In 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, detractors claimed that the bank’s focus on DEI was responsible – rather than the bank overinvesting in bonds that suddenly lost much of their value.
Not long afterward, when a wall panel detached from an Alaska Airlines flight at 16,000 feet, opponents claimed without evidence that DEI’s corrosive effects were to blame.
More recently, when a cargo ship lost power and slammed into Baltimore’s Key Bridge, critics suggested that DEI was somehow at fault.
In the face of these attacks, many company leaders are troublingly silent about their commitment to DEI. I believe this is a mistake. It allows misrepresentations to take root, and it reinforces the exclusion and marginalization many workers of color already experience.
For starters, it’s useful to take stock of how American companies moved to DEI in the first place, and how diversity practices are typically structured.
For the overwhelming majority of U.S. history, workers who weren’t white men weren’t just legally banned from leadership roles; they could be barred from holding any role in an organization.
The formal exclusion of women of all races and men of color didn’t become illegal until the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That means that for nearly 200 years after the country’s founding, white men had virtually unrestricted and exclusive access to the levels of power in all organizations.
The objective, meritocratic past that DEI critics imagine is thus a myth. The centuries-long, systematic exclusion of white women and people of color gives lie to the idea that jobs have historically gone only to the most qualified.
After the Civil Rights Act, companies moved to address the new reality that the racial and gender discrimination that had been practiced with impunity for generations was now illegal. Affirmative action policies were one way organizations sought to address past and ongoing discrimination, and many companies, at least for a time, sought to close racial and gender disparities.
But by the 1980s, backlash to these goals was ascendant. Legal decisions such as the Supreme Court’s 1978 Bakke ruling allowed organizations to consider race as one of many factors when they evaluated applicants but specifically outlawed the use of quotas. Companies could thus consider race as part of a package but, contrary to popular opinion, could not hire candidates simply because they were Black (or from another marginalized group).
Few ideas in business are as misunderstood as DEI.
In 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, detractors claimed that the bank’s focus on DEI was responsible – rather than the bank overinvesting in bonds that suddenly lost much of their value.
Not long afterward, when a wall panel detached from an Alaska Airlines flight at 16,000 feet, opponents claimed without evidence that DEI’s corrosive effects were to blame.
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