When I was in grade school, I had a daily after-school routine before my mother got home from work. I would watch the front window for her arrival, and when I spotted her, quickly turn off the TV, dash over to the kitchen table, and pretend that I had been studying the entire time. I thought it was an ingenious scheme, but it rarely fooled my mother. She was old-school. She hovered her hand over the television, and from its heat, knew that I had been watching. 

I remember this moment of motherly magic with fondness, but I also recall it with a sense of sadness. When she crossed the threshold, she was usually “bone tired,” as she would say. She worked as a computer programmer for the federal government. It was somewhat miraculous that she had that job, given her lack of college degree and generational proximity to slavery, Jim Crow, and women’s disenfranchisement. 

The job paid better than most, and unlocked countless opportunities for me and my sister—but it also cost our mother greatly. I experienced secondhand the stress she carried as a Black woman in the tech industry during the early 1980s—lower compensation, workplace hostility, and the expectation that she would train her younger, whiter, male colleagues to supersede her. Halfway through my time in college, she accepted a buyout offer, primarily to escape the toxic stress of having to constantly prove her worth. She didn’t get to enjoy her retirement for long. Within a few years, she was diagnosed with colon cancer, and a few years after that, at age 65, she died from the disease.  

I’ve been thinking about my mother’s journey a lot lately as we face the loud, politically motivated backlash against programs designed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) in workplaces and schools. Lost in the social media screeds, performative “anti-wokeness,” and legislative reversals is the original reason for pursuing D.E.I. in the first place: to prevent the insidious mechanisms of systemic racism, and other forms of exclusion, from keeping people like my mother from being valued for their talents and all of us from benefiting from them.

If I could speak with her today, I would love to tell her that things have gotten unequivocally better. But the limited progress we’ve seen is under fierce attack. As of last month, seven U.S. states have passed laws banning or restricting D.E.I. initiatives at public colleges, and 30 more bills are under consideration elsewhere in the country. Companies that made public commitments to these measures have shifted course, cynically and opportunistically, now that the spotlight has moved away from them. Infuriating examples are everywhere, from Edward Blum’s lawsuit against the Fearless Fund, to the ouster or exit of prominent D.E.I. executives like Karen Horne at Warner Bros. and Latondra Newton at Disney. Hostility against D.E.I. has also been normalized by uber-wealthy keyboard bullies like Bill Ackman, who essentially called former Harvard University president Claudine Gay a diversity hire during his targeting and harassment campaign. 

Is there any silver lining here? As Vernā Myers, a longtime D.E.I. strategist and former vice president of inclusion strategy at Netflix told me, “Backlash is our assurance that we’ve been making progress. You don’t have a backlash unless there’s been a movement forward.” And she’s right. For evidence that supports the efficacy of D.E.I., look no further than those well-known bastions of progressive, anti-colonial, woke thinking: the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Co. 

In their 2023 joint report on D.E.I. programs, they found an overwhelming majority of executive leaders and investors were willing to pay a premium to acquire a company with a positive environmental, social, and governance (E.S.G.) record. They found that 39 percent of global job-seekers turned down or decided not to pursue an opportunity because of a perceived lack of inclusion—and unsurprisingly, that preference was even more true for younger employees. And then there was the kicker, which belies the arguments flying out of the anti-D.E.I. pockets of Wall Street: that ethnically and gender diverse companies are more likely—by 36 percent and 25 percent, respectively—to financially outperform organizations of average diversity in their industry. To put it simply, the goal of D.E.I. isn’t to make white men feel threatened; it’s to make all of us more money. There are material economic upsides to maintaining these programs, so where did things go wrong?

One Step Back

Much of the “forward motion” that Myers alluded to arrived in the summer of 2020, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. I clearly remember a sense of shared humanity and outrage coursing through society. Organizations were stumbling over themselves to stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter, and to declare themselves anti-racist. They issued earnest statements, made commitments to diverse hiring, pledged donations to civil rights groups, and committed to expanding vendor relationships. (Some estimates found that these commitments totaled tens of billions of dollars.) Now, we know that many of those commitments were simply virtue signaling—but the current retrenchment can’t be blamed solely on a lack of seriousness by a few trend-riding opportunists.

After the summer of 2020, a flood of D.E.I. practitioners promised solutions and services. If you had the word “diversity” somewhere on your LinkedIn profile, you were getting hired, or at least courted. Spoiler alert: Not all of these people did good work. A one-size-fits-all approach to D.E.I. is a fantasy, and a lazy one. Implementing these measures can be hard, and requires a deep understanding of specific industries and businesses and individual company programs. And yes, some of the acronyms got out of control. While delivering a D.E.I. talk—yes, I have been paid to give these too, and yes, they are fire—I remember meeting someone who seriously said she was trying to rebrand D.E.I. as “JEDI B.,” as in justice, equity, diversity, inclusion, and belonging.

To understand the challenges, I spoke with five D.E.I. practitioners, including Adriele Parker, a diversity strategist and author of The Inclusive Leadership Journal. After the summer of 2020, she noted, anti-racism and unconscious bias training was often deployed to placate restless employees in the short term. “But what really works is actually figuring out the needs of your organization, having one-on-one interviews with a mix of people, and really learning from the pain points,” she told me.

And when these strategies were implemented, they were often heavy-handed. Some  D.E.I. programs used shame and punitive measures as tools, and thereby created an environment in which people were afraid to ask genuine questions about workplace dynamics. One friend of mine, an executive coach, told me about a well-known company that hired a D.E.I. strategist to run sessions at a retreat. This presenter used the term “monkey mind” to describe nervous, scattershot thinking, a common-enough phrase that originated in Buddhism. Some of the company’s (white) leaders were so offended on behalf of Black people—or at least afraid of being seen as bad allies in the face of potential racism—that they fired the presenter mid-conference. In our world of social platforms, where any mistake can be amplified to millions of others, overreactions have a chastening effect: If people are afraid of reprisal, they won’t say anything, but that doesn’t mean their questions and doubts will go away.

Given their skin-deep commitments, it’s no surprise that many companies changed course as soon as they faced economic challenges. I spoke with a partner at a professional services firm that made significant investments in D.E.I. but acknowledged that when revenues dropped by 20 percent, in 2023, the first people fired were the most recently hired, which often meant those that were brought on through diversity outreach programs. Some of these people were just launching their careers. By definition, they didn’t have the experience necessary to weather a round of layoffs, and didn’t have the quasi-safety net of a career’s worth of professional contacts to catch them. 

These factors—ineffective, broad-stroke implementation, resentment and fear born from suppression, and knee-jerk deprioritization during economic challenges—have been working against D.E.I. for at least the past four years. Toss in a Supreme Court decision overturning affirmative action, and war in the Middle East splintering communities across the nation, and the perfect storm gets even stormier. 

Of course, as the Times has documented, the movement to slow and reverse progress has been taking place in a coordinated, behind-the-scenes effort for much longer. It’s no coincidence that multiple governors and state legislatures are using the same language to pass the same restrictions on D.E.I.; nor is it an accident that multiple billionaires—inevitably white men—feel emboldened to write multi-thousand-word screeds on social media in defense of their historically secure power. In many ways, this feels like the Empire Strikes Back moment in the D.E.I. story. 

Silver Linings

I’m a perennial optimist, and I can envisage a few ways the D.E.I. movement can regain momentum. To start, the practitioners I spoke with agreed that these programs are most effective when they are tailored to a company’s mission and vision, and when the benchmarks of progress are clearly articulated. In other words, are the goals to retain talent, better serve customers, increase market share, improve innovation, and grow profitability—or is the aim just to get critics, internal or external, off your back? In other words, answering why a company is pursuing D.E.I. measures, and being honest about it, is an essential starting point. If you don’t have an answer, find one. 

Inclusion work also needs to include everyone. That means de-weaponizing D.E.I. by creating safe environments to ask questions, banning shame as a tactic, and building coalitions so that more people feel invested in the outcome. If people are afraid that including others comes at their own expense, it’s necessary to make the case for how it benefits the organization as a whole and everyone in it. Remind people that positive change can be uncomfortable for everyone. That means hearing questions and having discussions that can be challenging, which is not an excuse for hate speech (no Nazis, please) but rather an invitation for everyone to engage with disagreement. We are living in a multi-everything world—generations, races, genders, classes, and neurological abilities and experiences. Workplaces that can leverage the diverse marketplace of talent will be the most successful.

In this environment, true leadership is paramount. This means we should amplify people who aren’t the traditional voices for inclusion. Seeing Mark Cuban go to bat for D.E.I. has been deeply validating for the movement. While billionaires like Elon Musk and Bill Ackman hyperventilate about inclusion work being a form of reverse racism, Cuban has soberly yet forcefully reminded people that seeking out talent that’s traditionally undervalued, or underrepresented, is a competitive advantage, and that reducing employee stress related to belonging has a positive impact on productivity. 

Finally, we all need to practice patience. This work takes a long time. The systems we are trying to make more equitable were established over decades and centuries. They are built on laws, evaluation methods, business practices, and incentives that are deeply ingrained. Changing them will take several generations. As Myers told me, “The status quo is the most resilient force I have ever seen. It’s always finding its way back.” To keep the movement going, we need to celebrate all progress, as incremental as it might be, and not wait around for some undefined end state. Last week, I found myself at a party in Brooklyn for inclusion strategist Denise Hamilton’s new book, Indivisible: How to Forge Our Differences Into a Stronger Future. I can’t think of a more perfect text for the present moment. In it, she writes, “without a mechanism to honor growth at all levels, there is little incentive for people to move at all. … We have to create frameworks for everyone to grow, and we have to remove the shame of not knowing.” Hear, hear! 

Of course, those opposed to this progress want us to think that D.E.I. will disappear in a hail of lawsuits and censorship bills and fear. But as Myers told me, “It’s like technology; [D.E.I.] will be hard to put back in the bottle” because the benefits are clear and the networks of knowledge and practice are established. Once people taste freedom, they don’t want to go backward. It doesn’t make sense that admissions protocols and hiring practices designed for previous generations would be fit for the next. 

Change is never easy, and tempting to abandon in the face of resistance, but those are the moments in which we must remind ourselves of the bigger opportunities we are pursuing. I remember delivering a talk a few years back to a very white, very male audience. And I found my way to a line that still resonates: “I’m not here to take anything from you. I’m here to build something with you that neither of us could do if we insisted on seeing the world as me versus you. It’s better to see the world as us, as we.”