There has been considerable controversy on Energy Central recently regarding DEI programs. I´m not sure that the discussion even belongs on EC. And I hesitate to engage at all in this particular "culture war"issue. Nevertheless...
The intensity of the discussions range from assertions that DEI is or promotes bigotry in programs to enlarge the scope of HR searches for competent personnel by addressing racism in our society. This article by NPR and another from The New Yorker try to explain a bit about what happened.
Five years ago, in the wake of George Floyd's murder andthe sweeping reckoning on racism it sparked, corporate America rushed to join in.
Big businesses started making big — and expensive — promises to fight racism and increase diversity. Walmart, the world's largest company, spent $100 million on a new center on racial equity — and that was just one of many such investments.
But today, corporate America is rushing just as quickly in the other direction. Mounting political and legal attacks have turned DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — from a corporate rallying cry to a politically toxic football.
What the heck happened? This article suggests that companies failed to properly think through their programs, especially with regard to their costs.
Perhaps this example of attempts at socially conscious branding was the most damaging experience of all: The famous Bud Light commercial that suffered highly costly attacks from both sides - the far-right as well as from the LGBTQ communities.
Conservative critics have long claimed that DEI is itself discriminatory. But these attacks picked up momentum in 2023, when the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action at colleges and universities, ending the consideration of race in college admissions.
A recent article suggests this:
What critiques of D.E.I. tend to imply, but never quite openly say, is that competent white people are being replaced with incompetent Black people.
...liberals are now accused of compromising the health and safety of the public to appease the special-interest demographic of incompetent and unqualified Black workers. D.E.I. has been blamed for the collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge, the wildfires in Los Angeles, and the midair collision of a helicopter and a plane that killed sixty-seven people in Washington, D.C.
The veracity of the claims should be considered in light of who is making them. That Trump and Musk are suddenly the voice of anti-discrimination efforts makes a mockery of the idea. Throughout Trump’s first Presidency, he made racist and disparaging comments about people of color.
More recently, Trump appointed Darren Beattie to a State Department position; Beattie was fired from the first Trump Administration, in 2018, for speaking at a conference attended by white supremacists. Two of Musk’s government staffers were found to have made openly white-supremacist comments; one resigned and, a day later, Musk said that he intended to rehire him.
Musk’s Tesla has faced multiple lawsuits for workplace discrimination during the past decade. In 2024, a California state judge ruled that a class-action lawsuit against the company, involving almost six thousand Black workers, could move forward to determine whether Tesla had a “pattern or practice of failing to take all reasonable steps necessary to prevent discrimination and harassment from occurring” at its plant in Fremont. In the original case filing, sworn statements from more than two hundred Black former employees and contractors characterized the production floor as a “hotbed for racism,” including bigoted graffiti and the use of slurs. This led the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to also sue Tesla, alleging that the company had subjected Black employees at the Fremont plant “to severe or pervasive racial harassment and has created and maintained a hostile, race-based work environment.” This past March, a federal judge ruled that the E.E.O.C.’s lawsuit could go forward. (Tesla has denied wrongdoing.)
As if anyone needs to be told, there are hard data on racism. For example:
A 2021 study based on an experiment that sent out eighty-three thousand fictitious job applications with random characteristics to the hundred and eight largest employers in the United States found that “distinctively black names” reduced the “probability of employer contact.” According to the study, twenty-three of the employers were “found to discriminate against Black applicants.” In 2022, Wells Fargo was forced to pay eight million dollars to more than thirty thousand Black job applicants to settle a claim based on a Department of Labor lawsuit, which alleged that the bank interviewed Black applicants for jobs that had already been filled in order to fulfill diversity requirements. The United States is awash in racism even as some Black people have risen to the highest ranks within our country—including the Presidency.
From NPR:
Now the Chief Executive´s efforts to end DEI in the federal government are expected to ripple into the private sector. Walmart, Meta, Amazon and many others have already joined the retreat, ending many of their 2020-era pledges and programs. For example, Walmart in November said it won't renew the funding for its racial equity center and that it will end some other diversity-focused programs
DEI vs. Affirmative Action (NPR):
Unlike D.E.I., which is typically voluntary and aimed at changing company culture or social dynamics, Johnson’s (Lyndon Johnson re: Affirmative Action) order required private contractors doing work on behalf of the federal government to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and that employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Perhaps NPR says it most clearly:
Diversity In Action At NPR
In our journalism, diversity means accurately and authentically reporting on the country and the world, which is only possible with the robust inclusion of the stories and voices of, about and by people who, because of the actions of individuals and systems, are so often under-covered, misrepresented or left out. Inclusion means embracing ideas that run counter to or outside of long-held notions and narratives created without the benefit of the diversity of people and perspectives we now seek.
In our content, diversity means including people in their difference and in their ordinariness, mitigating the biases and prejudices that can warp coverage and distort truth. In hiring, we are striving to create a workforce that, at every level, looks more like America, even as we work to overcome a legacy of exclusion.
Diversity means that we are doing the hard work of rooting out bigotry and bias in structures, systems and processes and replacing them with equity, empowerment, and fairness. It means that everyone is learning and growing, expanding their understanding of themselves and others and shedding the flawed and consequential views and practices that have made so much of this work necessary.
At NPR, diversity is not a program or initiative. It is an inextricable part of our mission to serve the American public.
From the New Yorker:
The end of affirmative action, in 2023, has helped pave the way for this latest effort to claim that racism doesn’t exist in any systematic way and to strip away institutions’ ability to challenge it.
The whole point of DEI, according to this article, is that DEI was supposed to help increase profits.
'Diversity is always going to help the bottom line,'
said Sekou Bermiss, an associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But, Bermis sai:
"But no one [who studies this] would ever say that."
Still, Bermiss and others point out that DEI policies can have significant business impacts, even if they're not apparent in short-term financial results. Having a more diverse team can help create products that appeal to more consumers, or help employees feel more satisfied with their jobs.
Still, some major companies are convinced that DEI is "good for business". Costco and JPMorgan Chase, among them.
One result is that companies are simply rebranding DEI programs by eliminating the "...now-politically toxic acronym from their websites and corporate statements." as well as to help avoid becoming legal targets
And then there´s this apparent paradox:
In a little-noticed section of the company’s annual report published on Jan. 29, its board promised to monitor “how Tesla recruits, develops and retains excellent talent.”
For shareholders who have long pushed Tesla to address complaints of racism at its factory in Fremont, Calif., the generic wording seemed to represent a rare case of the company’s changing its behavior in the face of criticism.
For the first time the board was taking responsibility for how the company treats employees, some investors said. It has been accused in lawsuits of being too passive in its oversight of Mr. Musk, who runs several other companies and has been deputized by President Trump to cut government spending.
Is Musk trying to play both sides? Could it be because of this?
Tesla has experienced a rocky start to the year in European markets. Sales are down in Europe, including a 63.4% YoY drop in France for January. In Germany, hosting the EV maker's only European factory, 1277 new Teslas were registered in the first month of the year, a 59.5% decrease.
And this:
It´s always a difficult task to explain why business initiatives sometimes produce good or bad results, and why. Sometimes it is just a matter of timing.
It is easy to dismiss D.E.I. programs as ineffectual, because in many ways they have been. But that raises the question of why the right is so determined to undermine and dismiss them. It is because these widely varied efforts represent a commitment to integration, to opposing bigotry and racism, to offering an invitation to belong. Maybe that seems corny in our deeply cynical and dour society...
And from NPR:
And it remains to be seen whether corporate America can really be more effective while softening its language — and goals — around diversity, equity and inclusion.
Paradigm CEO Joelle Emerson says that even companies that are ending DEI programs may rebrand the work rather than abandoning it altogether. ...Now she's hoping that employers are taking the time to create more thoughtful — and effective — programs to increase fairness.
"I'm actually pretty optimistic about the future of this work," she says. "I'm not optimistic about the acronym DEI — nor do I particularly care."
I agree.