We should be very worried about the decline of DEI
"It’s another indication that the United States is going backward, only four years after the George Floyd protests.
Diversity initiatives, particularly the diversity, equity and inclusion programs that proliferated in corporate America over the past decade, have some shortcomings. But the rapid retrenchment of DEI is another indication that the United States is going backward only a few years after the widespread protests of George Floyd’s killing seemed to signal that the country was finally ready to truly address its long history of discrimination and inequality.
Over the past few months, so many companies, from Facebook to McDonald’s to Walmart, have announced that they are ending or scaling back their DEI efforts that it’s hard to keep track. What exactly these companies are curtailing varies widely. Some had set specific targets for the number of women and people of color they hoped to hire, while others simply had more general initiatives to make sure people of all identities felt comfortable in the workplace.
But broadly, major corporations are now indicating that they will be somewhat less concerned about hiring women, LGBTQ+ people, people of color and those with disabilities and about taking steps to create positive environments for them at work.
Other institutions, particularly colleges, are making similar moves. Some schools are ending efforts to increase the number of Native, Black and Latino students they admit or cutting scholarships designated for minorities. Others are closing special on-campus centers that sponsored events and programs for Black, LGBTQ+ or female students, as well as for other identity groups.
Follow Perry Bacon Jr.
This diversity rollback is partly because of a changing legal climate. The 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that severely restricted affirmative action in college admissions indicated that conservative judges on the high court and lower courts are skeptical of basically any consideration of ethnicity and race. So conservative legal groups have been filing lawsuits against corporations, arguing that their DEI programs too closely resemble what universities were doing before the Supreme Court’s affirmative action ruling. Many companies argue they are discontinuing diversity initiatives on their own, largely because they fear that judges would soon invalidate those policies anyway.
But this shift is about more than the law. The social and political environment in the United States has changed. I suspect some of the corporations that launched or expanded their DEI programs weren’t doing so because of their deep convictions about racism and sexism. Instead, they were responding to the broader mood in the country, where it seemed important to demonstrate your commitment to diversity and to defending minority rights.
That “wokeness” has been in decline as memories of Floyd’s killing and the protests over it have faded. The victory of Donald Trump, a strong critic of diversity initiatives, has reinforced the sense that the Black Lives Matter and George Floyd eras are over.
This advancing anti-DEI movement is grounded in two very flawed premises that undermine much-needed change. The first premise, usually articulated by conservatives, is that policies and initiatives that acknowledge gender, race and other kinds of identity are needlessly divisive. Their argument is essentially that identity-based tensions would go away or be less challenging for the country if people stopped talking about identity so much.
Second, many Democrats and liberals, while fine with, say, having a center for Black students on a college campus, are offended by diversity initiatives that cut against the meritocracy they think America can be (and generally is). So these liberals at times join conservatives in being opposed to gender or race being considered in admissions to elite high schools and colleges and for workplace hiring.
But the reality is that we don’t live in a society in which identity doesn’t matter — and people with some identities are more likely to be disadvantaged than those with others. There are numerous studies showing unconscious bias that results in employers being less likely to interview someone with a name identified with African Americans for a job. Women on average are paid less than men in part because they are less likely to be chosen for management positions. Because of historic discrimination, African and Native Americans whose families have lived in the United States for generations tend to have less wealth than their White counterparts. Transgender people and Muslims often face direct bigotry.
Present-day DEI programs and the affirmative action and diversity initiatives that came before them are implicit rejections of these myths about meritocracy and a post-identity society. A company making sure its recruiters go to historically Black colleges such as Howard to look for potential workers (an approach encouraged by some DEI programs) is acknowledging that race matters and that having employees of different races is important. Such a company is also acknowledging that there is no truly objective, identity-blind hiring process and that making direct efforts to find Black candidates addresses the common problem of heavily White companies rarely bringing in people of color because they rely on the hiring suggestions of their current White staffers.
It is not surprising that DEI initiatives have generated so much backlash because many Americans desperately want to live in a country where your gender, race, religion and sexual orientation aren’t barriers to economic success and personal freedom and where all that matters is your hard work and skills. I do too. But we can’t wish that into existence. We need DEI policies because they acknowledge the actual society we live in — in which gender, race and other identities still matter.
I would acknowledge that some diversity initiatives aren’t perfect. It’s unclear whether implicit bias training actually reduces bigoted thinking. And there are reasonable questions about how identity should be addressed. I am not sure companies should have specific targets for the number of women and people of color they hire.
But the real problem with DEI is not that it goes too far but that it doesn’t go nearly far enough. Many DEI initiatives and the broader DEI push have in some ways distracted from more sweeping policy changes the country needs. Millions of Americans, including many White people, struggle to pay for child care and housing. Broad-based universal economic programs, such as Medicare-for-all, would help a huge swath of Americans but would disproportionately benefit people of color, who tend to have lower incomes. We need aggressive policies that are targeted at specific groups, from reforming civil rights laws to include protections for transgender Americans to integrating schools so that Black and Latino students can get the highest-quality education possible.
Getting a few more women, people of color and LGBTQ+ people into corporate offices and elite universities — the focus of many DEI efforts — does not deeply address economic inequality or identity-based discrimination and inequality. And I worry that DEI at times allows a kind of fake justice as opposed to the real thing. Corporations that until recently were hiring a few more women and people of color for their corporate offices through diversity initiatives often provide very low pay and meager benefits for the much larger group of employees (including many women and minorities) who work in their stores and factories.
Many of these corporations also donate money to politicians who oppose more government funding for health care, child care and education — the kind of universal progressive policies that would benefit way more people (including those of color) than any corporate DEI program.
Universities that used affirmative action to increase their numbers of Black, Native American and Latino students — such as Harvard — have also kept in place practices that ensure a huge swath of their students come from very wealthy families (such as giving extra admission consideration to the children of alumni).
The Democratic Party doesn’t formally have a DEI program. But it takes a similar approach to that of big companies. The party is much more comfortable elevating a few people of color (Barack Obama, Kamala Harris, Hakeem Jeffries) than pushing for sweeping changes. It would have been much better if Rep. James E. Clyburn (D-South Carolina) had conditioned his 2020 endorsement of Joe Biden on Biden supporting some initiative that would have benefited millions of African Americans instead of demanding that Biden appoint a single Black woman to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Diversity, equity and inclusion was never the whole solution. But it was a small part of the changes we need to create a country where Black lives, lesbian lives, female lives and others are truly valued and respected. That DEI is dying as Trump is set to begin his second term isn’t an accident but part of the same story. America’s moral arc is not bending toward justice — and I don’t know when it will again."
![[object Object]](https://static01.nyt.com/images/2025/01/16/multimedia/16mideast-crisis-carousel-morning-01-tqjl/16mideast-crisis-carousel-morning-01-tqjl-threeByTwoMediumAt2X.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp)
