The D.E.I. Blame Game

Hi you, Is it just me, or are there a lot of things happening lately? Before diving into our main story—a close look at what’s lurking beneath the recent wave of D.E.I. hysteria—let’s start with a few items grabbing my attention…

Attention Pittsburgh! There are still a few tickets left for my event with public television station WQED, in which I’ll talk about my PBS series, America Outdoors, in front of a live audience. It’s happening this Tuesday evening from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Come say hi!
Like many who work in the media and entertainment industries, I was deeply disappointed to discover that Participant Media is shutting down. (As usual, my partner Matt Belloni has some of the backstory.) I’ve had a long history with Participant, certainly as a fan of many of its films, but also on a more personal level: Until the announcement of its closure, I served on the company’s Impact Advisory Council, which made sure its films had real-world impact. I also got my first-ever live television job on its short-lived Pivot TV network, where I co-hosted TakePart Live with Meghan McCain and Jacob Soboroff (yep, there’s a pic).Over the years, I gained a lot of perspective from the stories Participant told, and the way it told them. I’m sad to see this champion of meaningful storytelling exit the arena, but I’m confident they laid important groundwork for others to build upon. (For instance, this documentary film about a group of Native American cyclists trying to bring the sport of mountain biking to the Navajo Nation, where no bike shops exist.)
In the fight against book bans, librarians have been stepping up. I’ve proudly served on the board of the Brooklyn Public Library for many years, and along with Seattle Public Library, they’ve just released a report on the Books Unbanned program. This nationwide initiative is designed to combat the rising trend of book bans and challenges in schools and libraries, especially those targeting books with diverse themes and representation. B.P.L. launched the program in April 2022, with Seattle joining a year later. The program offers free digital library cards to teens and young adults, enabling them to check out books online that their cowardly local politicians have prohibited.
Oh, and Elon forced me to wear his verified blue check mark on X. I don’t and won’t pay for X. I maintain a presence there to protect my name, occasionally retweet things, and respond to folks in communities I care about who still operate there. I spend more time on Threads and am playing with the new AirChat. But forcing me to wear that badge feels like a non-consensual relationship move. I’m not trying to wear your varsity letter jacket, dude. I’m just not that into you! Leave me alone!
And finally, a palate cleanser: “The rise of the far-right around the world is profoundly troubling, underpinned as it is by dystopian visions of the future and the need for ‘strong’ leaders to protect us from those futures. But what would a Manifesto look like that was based on a positive vision of the future, one that is appropriately ambitious to the scale of the challenges the world is facing while at the same time bold, imaginative and audacious?” This question has been answered in a collection of positive visions of the future titled Ministry of Imagination. It’s based on the 100-episode run of the podcast From What If to What Next, which I had the pleasure of joining as a guest. A few of my ideas are represented among the 600 in the collection, on topics ranging from the economy, to media and communications, to climate change and more.

And now, brace yourselves. Bridges are falling. Planes are breaking apart. Trains are literally coming off the track. All because of… (checks notes), D.E.I.?

The D.E.I. Blame Game

Are panels really flying off Boeing 737s due to wokeness? An honest look at the recent D.E.I. hysteria.

BARATUNDE THURSTON

Just over a year ago, in March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in spectacular fashion. The flurry of official postmortems—the Barr report, the O.I.G. report, and the Bair report—all found that the bank’s board of directors had egregiously failed to consider that, in a rising interest rate environment, the bank’s billions in assets (held in long-dated treasuries and bonds) could not cover the bank’s short-dated liabilities during a mass withdrawal event. Of course, that’s exactly what happened. Alarmed depositors rushed to get their money out, and boom, the third-largest bank run in U.S. history was on. But by the time these official reports came out, a far more inane theory had taken hold in certain quarters of the culture: that the bank’s D.E.I. initiatives were to blame. In an interview with Fox News, Republican Rep. James Comer called SVB “one of the most woke banks.” Wall Street Journal columnist Andy Kessler speculated that SVB’s (basically negligible) boardroom diversity may have “distracted” the bank. Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus also told Fox that “these banks are badly run because everybody is focused on diversity and all of the ‘woke’ issues.” And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis claimed that SVB was “so concerned with D.E.I. and politics and all kinds of stuff” that it was diverted from its “core mission.” (DeSantis would know a thing or two about failing a core mission…) The reality is that SVB imploded because it succumbed to groupthink and didn’t properly manage risk. In the year since, it’s become increasingly commonplace for political and business leaders to use D.E.I. as a scapegoat for virtually every societal, business, or technical failure. Sure, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are imperfect—I’ve written about this recently, myself—but over the past year, critics have blamed diversity initiatives for almost everything, almost like witchcraft in 1700s America, while conveniently overlooking the real issues facing our industries. Examples are everywhere, and they’re infuriating. Just last year, when Norfolk Southern trains were literally going off the rails, Republican Rep. Mike Collins shrewdly identified the culprit. “After seeing another Norfolk Southern train derailed this weekend, I was reminded of the fact that the company wrote to shareholders stating it is focused on D.E.I.,” he said in a speech on the House floor. “This administration’s focus on D.E.I. is forcing private companies to rethink their goals, and one has to wonder, was Norfolk Southern’s D.E.I. policies directing resources away from the important things like greasing wheel bearings? This insanity must stop!” Naturally, it turns out that just before the derailment, Norfolk Southern had successfully lobbied to kill a federal rule that would have forced the rail industry to upgrade its Civil War-era braking systems. After the deadly Maui wildfires, Vivek Ramaswamy, the most annoying person to ever run for president, posted on X that firefighting delays were caused by “an Obama Foundation ‘Asia Pacific Leader’ & a climate activist who believes water should be ‘revered.’... The DEI agenda is literally costing people their lives.” While the investigation hasn’t concluded, the tragic fires, which claimed 101 lives, seem to have resulted from Hurricane Dora’s intense winds, drought conditions, an overwhelmed fire department facing communications challenges, and possibly downed power lines. In addition to climate change, the radical transformation of Hawaii’s land in the generations since colonization has also made it more susceptible to fires. It’s not the diversity efforts but the transformation of the island’s ecology that’s more likely to blame. Obviously, D.E.I. initiatives aren’t forcing trains off their tracks and causing fires in drought-stricken lands. But other than having received the same talking points memo, why would such a diverse array of Republican politicians have settled on such a consistent and patently absurd message? I doubt they actually believe it, because—and this is hard to admit—I doubt they are actual idiots. They’ve merely found a convenient scapegoat that riles up their base. However, the consequences are serious: These leaders are reinforcing the notion that the inclusion of women, Black people, and LGBTQ people in our workforces is dangerous.

Perhaps the most genuinely terrifying trend to emerge over the past year is that our planes are literally falling apart in the air. Thankfully, Elon Musk, the world’s most overstretched C.E.O, has an explanation: “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized D.E.I. hiring over your safety? That is actually happening.” Of course, that’s not actually happening. What has happened is that Boeing, for years, has been deprioritizing its once rigorous safety and compliance standards, cutting corners in manufacturing and maintenance, and pushing for laws that would make it harder for regulators to review its work. Corporate recruiting programs that aim to increase the number of diverse candidates entering the training pipeline isn’t the reason Boeing doors are falling off. To solve that riddle, Elon—who has been charged with overseeing discriminatory working conditions—might want to look at the company’s C-suite. It’s incredible that he has time to peddle conspiracy theories on X when malfunctioning accelerator pedals on his Cybertruck just caused the company to recall every single trapezoidal clown car it’s sold.When one D.E.I. critic goes low, another is waiting in the wings to go even lower. In January, Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo used an Iranian drone attack on U.S. service members, which left three soldiers dead and 40 injured, as an opportunity to speculate that, “maybe they’re focused too much on D.E.I. There’s a concern at the FBI because they’re dropping the F.B.I. special agent requirements in the name of D.E.I. I’m just wondering if that has anything to do with missing an important drone that just killed three of our heroes.” I’m just wondering if Bartiromo is aware that today’s U.S. military is the most diverse it’s ever been. Or that study after study concludes that it’s this very diversity that will allow the military to maintain its effectiveness, despite its smaller size, and that wielding soft power depends on a diverse fighting force. If these D.E.I. critics genuinely cared about wildfires or airline safety, military readiness or train derailments, they would focus their public comments on climate change, corporate safety culture, and U.S.-Iranian relations. But in making D.E.I. a boogeyman, they’ve created a universal scapegoat that allows two things: First, they get to avoid the difficult work involved with investigating these problems; and second, this facile scapegoat offers a cheap and reliable means of stoking fear and agitating the Republican base. Blaming D.E.I. is not much different than blaming wokeness, C.R.T., affirmative action, political correctness, or even desegregation for society’s problems. The language changes, but what remains the same is the ideology, rooted in white supremacy, that sees anything “other” as less than, and sees expansion of opportunity as a threat to those who already hold power. I’m not willing to commit the same offense. I can acknowledge that D.E.I. initiatives are not always successful, but if you’re a leader who needs D.E.I. to explain a plane failure, rather than a culture of shortcuts and monopolistic business practices, you’re not committed to the “free market” you claim to champion. If you’re ignoring the data that shows that diverse workplaces are literally more profitable, then maybe you’re not actually interested in helping our economy boom. Instead, the reality is that you’re more interested in prioritizing politics over your constituencies, and the society you’ve promised to defend.

FOUR STORIES WE’RE TALKING ABOUT

CNN and Its Discontents

Examining the mood inside Hudson Yards.

DYLAN BYERS

D.C.’s Dark Money Boom

Charting the eruption of G.O.P. dark money groups.

TARA PALMERI

Skoll & Crossbones

An inside account of the shuttering of Participant Media.

MATTHEW BELLONI

Minkoff Moves

The skinny on Rebecca Minkoff’s Real Housewives revival.

LAUREN SHERMAN

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