Winning the War on DEI
We entered the festive season with a devastatingly, almost laughably on-brand message from Elon Musk:
Admittedly, when a post like this - from a character like Musk, whose raison d'être these days seems to be reactionary trolling - hits the news cycle right at the tail end of an exhausting year, it’s tempting to ignore.
Does this kind of deliberate goading even warrant a response from the DEI community? Which fights to have, which debates to engage in, which bad-faith accusations to answer - these are ongoing questions many of us grapple with. Should we waste our time trying to win over those who rail against our efforts? Is it even possible, or productive to do so? And does engaging in ‘debate’ with those who actively seek to delegitimise our work (in order to preserve the status quo and their privileged position within it) serve to give their bigotry airtime?
I am reminded in times like these of the words of the great Toni Morrison:
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
Musk’s tweet was a (likely deliberate) misconstruing of the fundamental aims and principles of DEI. Equity work - which acknowledges the deep biases that have long existed in our institutions, and seeks systemic change in order to promote fairness, and produce better outcomes - is often treated as a threat by those whom the current system has served well. DEI is not about ‘reverse discrimination’ any more than feminism is about ‘hating men’, but these are easy, lazy ways to stoke anger, resentment and fear.
Beyond the petty trolling of individual characters like Musk, there is a very real and concerted movement to resist the wave of change which so many organisations promised back in 2020 (and are now quietly backtracking on). As Dr. Jonathan P. Higgins pointed out back in December, Musk isn’t alone. Many execs feel similarly hostile towards DEI - he “simply said the quiet part out loud.” The backlash has been gathering steam for at least the past 12 months. In fact, we can look back as far as 2016 to the election of an openly white-supremacist, misogynist US president immediately following the tenure of the nation’s first Black president, to tell us all we need to know about how systems of power behave in response to disruptive change.
Since mid-2023, the anti-DEI machine has kicked into a new gear. It’s possible to draw a direct line from the US Supreme Court’s strike down of Affirmative Action back in June, through the emboldening of ‘anti-woke’ sentiment, through to this week and the success of the campaign to force Harvard’s first Black woman president to resign, through spurious plagiarism accusations that have been refuted by her academic peers themselves.
Two days ago, the conservative activist who spearheaded the campaign to oust Claudine Gay wrote an op-ed entitled (and I’m not joking) “How We Squeezed Harvard to Push Claudine Gay Out: Conservatives can prevail in the culture wars by understanding how power works—and using it”. In it, he explicitly outlines how they applied concerted, strategic pressure to topple a Black woman from her perch atop one of the world’s most prestigious academic institutions - and how news publications went from ignoring his campaign, to calling for Ms. Gay to resign. What a heartbreaking reminder for Black women; that no matter the work we do to colour inside the lines, to achieve excellence, to reach the pinnacle of career success, this can be torn away in an instant by those who despise us.
Believing in the inherent ‘colourblind’ meritocracy of the world is often central to the self-image of those who have achieved economic success. That myth of the ‘self-made’ is a soothing balm to those who want to be able to sleep at night, counting their billions whilst the world burns. Their success can be neatly attributed to hard work and brilliance (rather than privilege or luck), putting others’ lack of success down to their comparative lack of hard work or brilliance (rather than any wider systemic forces or oppressive power structures). The Harvard case is a perfect encapsulation of this warped mentality; an institution in which legacy admissions (i.e. children of patrons & alumni) make up 5% of applications, but 30% of acceptances has caved to a racist campaign led in large part by one of its wealthiest donors - on the premise of merit of all things!
As the anti-racist activist and scholar Ibram X. Kendi has pointed out in response to this issue:
“To assume merit is the reason White people are overrepresented in positions of power and influence is to assume White people are superior. To assume peoples of color in positions of power and influence are unqualified and unmerited is to assume peoples of color are inferior. To assume White people are superior and peoples of color are inferior is to believe racist ideas. To believe racist ideas is to assume the problems are peoples of color and antiracist efforts to abolish the structure of racism. To attack antiracist efforts is to conserve the structure of racism. It isn’t rocket science, what these people are doing.”
For those of us who care deeply about making the world a fairer, more equitable place - and transforming our institutions for the better - the work continues. In the face of the current barrage, it would be easy to lose heart. But in order to win the war on DEI, we must:
Prepare for and expect backlash. DEI seeks to disrupt existing power structures. We should expect those who sit atop those power structures to use everything in their arsenal to stem the tides of change. Coming to terms with this expectation enables us to forge on, rather than being shocked and blindsided by each individual blow.
Play the long game. As Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. rightly said “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Change takes time, and requires sustained pressure, but history shows us that the world can be changed in ways that previously seemed unimaginable, through the actions of a few brave people.
Protect our peace. Heeding Toni Morrison’s warning that racism “keeps you from you doing your work… keeps you explaining” means getting serious and thoughtful about where we place our energy. Taking the bait, and getting drawn into arguments with bad-faith actors serves only to exhaust us. There’s real work to do in our organisations and communities which deserves our time and attention.
Reject the premise. Those that characterise DEI as ‘reverse discrimination’ live in a zero-sum world. More people having access to higher education, economic opportunity, and equal rights must equate to less for them - to their slice of the pie getting smaller. It’s a tale as old as time. Gay rights somehow mean less rights for straight people. Affirmative action somehow means less opportunity for white people. We can and we must reject the very premise of this argument. Uplifting the most marginalised uplifts us all; zero-sum thinking is a losing game.
Recently, I worked with an organisation on their inclusive language policy. During the collaborative process, their (straight, white) HR leader and I had a profound conversation about how using inclusive, gender-neutral language about family structures was actually deeply powerful for her, as a child of adoptive parents. The most visible, most marginalised communities in our society (Black people, trans people) often face the brunt of right-wing anti-DEI backlash, but it’s important to remember that the positive changes we make echo out way beyond just these groups, and often in unexpected ways.
DEI is about transformation. It’s about the long game. And it’s about building a better world for us all.
The second episode of the second season of our podcast ‘In Polite Company’ is now live! This episode is, fittingly, about mental health in the Black community. It’s a wide-ranging conversation in which we discuss everything from schooling, to the origins of Black mistrust in medical institutions, to the impact of internet voyeurism (in which the ability to see violence enacted on Black bodies has become more and more commonplace).
So if you’d like to receive more DEI musings in audio format, please give it a listen.
