Over the last few months, I’ve had a lot of conversations about diversity, inclusion, and equity programs, talking to conservatives, liberals, practitioners, and critics of DEI programs. Most of them agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity, for fear of harassment, retaliation, and even doxxing and swatting — that is, vindictively publishing personal information to the internet or calling in a fraudulent police report to provoke a strong, armed law enforcement response. Notably, I heard these fears from people on all sides of the debate.
Earlier this month, I tried to lay out some of the key takeaways from what I’ve heard about diversity — which, in broad strokes, refers to efforts to make the workforce, classroom, and media landscape generally representative of the world we live in.
Related: Sunday Edition: Diversity and its Discontents, Part I
Diversity is a big part of DEI, and is sometimes used as a shorthand for the whole movement. That’s understandable because diversity efforts are often the most outwardly visible part of DEI — and efforts to create and maintain diversity are likely to be met with the highest-profile legal challenges following the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard.
But there’s a lot more to DEI than diversity — and when I talked to critics of DEI, the pushback I heard often had more to do with inclusion than diversity. As with diversity, the general principle of inclusion struck most people as inherently, self-evidently good — but the practical application of programs designed to ensure inclusion sometimes seemed to cause more harm than good.
And, when I really dug down, a lot of the issue came down to one word — equity — more than anything else. For proponents and practitioners of DEI, equity is the whole reason for the movement. And for those who oppose DEI, equity is at the core of their concerns and, in some cases, anger.
Inclusion
For a lot of reasons, inclusion is harder to get at than diversity. For one, polling on DEI rarely breaks out the three constituent parts — diversity, equity, and inclusion — to see if there’s varying feedback. For another, in my conversations, it was less common for people to collapse all the facets of inclusion down into racial binaries (i.e. Black employees being excluded). And, perhaps obviously, inclusion efforts often have to do with internal policies and organizational culture, things that aren’t as readily visible as diversity.
In most of my conversations, people thought inclusion was a good thing: “Yeah, obviously,” “no-brainer,” and, “well, duh,” were frequent responses. Why wouldn’t you be inclusive?
But a fair number of people felt their workplace, school, or organization fell short on inclusion. Often, but not always, these people felt excluded because of who they were, be it a disabled veteran, a queer Black woman, or a conservative Catholic. They’d all be hired — on the merits, they all said — but now felt like they were stagnating and having trouble getting “on the inside” or “on the core team” or “in the leadership pipeline.”
“If diversity’s about getting a foot in the door, inclusion is about getting a seat at the table,” one DEI practitioner told me. “And there are lots of organizations, a lot of companies, police forces, you name it, where they’re happy to do one but not the other.”
The most common analogy used by DEI practitioners was to handicap accessibility. One example came from a White U.S. Army veteran, who lost a leg above the knee and used both a wheelchair and a prosthesis-and-crutch combo. After spending some time in Brooklyn working in tech, he moved into DEI work, in part inspired by his start-up workplace, which he described as a “pretty classic tech-bro paradise.”
He said the high-ceilinged, open-concept office space had plenty of work stations, but also bean bags, ping-pong tables, a high-end espresso machine, and wrist-band activated beer taps that could be turned on if the teams hit certain KPIs (or on Friday afternoons). All of that was fine, he said. The issue, was the loft office.
“They'd had someone build this thing, like eight feet up in the air, with a spiral metal staircase up and a firepole to get down. Like a treehouse, sorta. Absolutely not up to code, not that anyone ever said anything. The co-founders would hold little brainstorming sessions up there, and sometimes they’d grab someone from the team and go up there and shoot the shit and have a beer, like an attaboy. And it was kind of just the elephant in the room for me. It was so glaring, but totally invisible to them — until it was, you know, my turn. I’d killed it on a project and you could see it occur to them, like in real time. looking at me, looking at the loft — and then they were very apologetic. But it really was like they had just seen it, in that moment,” he told me.
After he went into DEI work, he often used his personal experience to frame how a marginalized person might feel about a workplace culture that seemed great to some, but unwelcoming, even hostile, to others — even if that hostility was never directly articulated.
It’s worth noting that I didn’t often hear someone say they’d been overtly excluded at work or in the classroom, but it did come up.
I talked to one conservative White woman who told me she’d be rejected for a promotion about ten years ago because a VP had overheard she was thinking about having kids down the line and “didn’t want that maternity leave hanging over their heads.” And I heard from a few folks who felt that workplace discrimination had crossed over into overt racism. One Black man working in finance told me his supervisor told him he was “too street” to be part of a team pitching a new banking product. Another man, a practicing Jew working in hospitality, told me a colleague had straight-up used an ethnic slur during a team meeting, prompting laughter from his boss, who later promoted the colleague over him.
I’m not an attorney, but these seem like the stuff of actionable lawsuits. But it’s also been the exception, not the rule, in the conversations I’ve had. Most exclusion — which is to say, discrimination — was either much subtler or unintentional. And that’s the kind of thing that inclusion efforts usually target: unconscious bias, microaggressions, stereotypes, etc.
Now, I’ve spent time inside some relatively woke organizations: NYU and SUNY Stony Brook, grassroots mutual aid organizations, and non-profits (and, yes, some would add public media to that list). And I can tell you, they were hardly free of prejudice — and there was always someone there who could have benefitted from a little sensitivity training.
And when I used the phrase — “sensitivity training,” or some variant — I got a lot of eye-rolls and rueful sighs. People said they found it infantilizing, unnecessary, and cringeworthy. But when I drilled down, many people acknowledged they knew someone who could probably “use a PC tune-up,” as one Hispanic firefighter told me.
Many of these training sessions are, honestly, pretty innocuous. For the last five years, I’ve taken an annual training that, as I understand it, most public media outlets provide for their employees. A key complaint I often hear about inclusion training is that they sometimes focus largely — even entirely — on race relations, to the exclusion of things like disability, veteran status, or religion. But our training was pretty boilerplate, in a good way, covering all the protected classes and a range of scenarios pretty evenly.
Now, prior to these trainings, was I planning on asking a Black person if I could touch their hair, offering unsolicited commentary on a woman’s pregnancy, or hitting on a colleague? No. I was not. But was it worth a half-hour of my life to help make sure everyone I work with is on the same page about those things? Sure.
Groundwater Poisoning
But that’s not always been the case. As a journalist, I’ve taken more than one ‘groundwater’ training that focused almost exclusively on racial inequities (the name comes from a metaphor suggesting the very wellspring of the United States was poisoned by racism, above and apart from socio-economic inequality, which structures our current society).
The purpose, as best I could intuit it, was to convince us that racism was real and those inequalities existed. It seemed condescending, in that it assumed we — a bunch of reporters — were somehow completely unaware of the racial issues in the United States (to say nothing of how those issues look in the South). But it was also devoid of practical application: the training never pivoted to, “and here’s what you could do differently,” or “here are some ways to approach your work in a better way.” When I asked about this, the training instructor basically told me that wasn’t the point. Maybe if there had been a follow-up, or if this was a level-setting intro to a series, it might have made sense. But that wasn’t the case.
I’ve heard similar stories from lots of people. Several conservative White people told me their local organization had required them to watch a documentary on the 1898 Wilmington coup d’etat and massacre (some, but not all, had already seen it). They mostly agreed that the event (a) was horrifying, (b) did lasting damage to the Black community, (c) was deliberately kept out of public discussion and education for decades, and (d) ought to be somberly memorialized. But none of them felt it was appropriate for a documentary viewing to be a kind of socially compulsory event.
“You didn’t have to go, I guess. But if you didn’t go, it was like, ‘why didn’t you go?’ Why don’t you support this? It was on you to defend not wanting to learn about 1898. Even if you already knew about it. You had to be seen watching it. It was like a bizarre kind of White-guilt networking event,” one man told me.
One Black deputy, who previously worked in western North Carolina, told me his division had a similar training. For about an hour, they watched an instructional Zoom lecture on how policing in the United States has its origins in ‘slave patrols,’ dating back to the early 1700s in the Carolina colonies. The history was factual, but the training ended without connecting any dots. For a room full of law enforcement officers, including Black and Hispanic deputies, what was the takeaway supposed to be?
“The Black deputies in my division were like, ‘what was that?’ And the White deputies had the same question,” he told me. “It felt a little jacked up. This doesn’t help me — this doesn’t get bad deputies off of patrol. It just kind of laid there.”
That same deputy acknowledged the sheriff’s office he worked for had a serious problem with race relations — both internally and with the public. He said he felt the training had “been a grift,” not because he didn’t think it was needed, but because it didn’t go anywhere near far enough.
“We needed soul searching, man. Not a Zoom meeting. Soul searching,” he told me.
Across dozens of conversations, people told me they felt like DEI training was just an exercise in pointless self-flagellation — often for two different reasons. Both liberals and conservatives frequently said the trainings needed to be more like a targeted HR response for individual employees, saying they weren’t the ones who needed it. Others, mostly left-leaning folks, said DEI training was just a box-checking reflex that failed to change material conditions in any real way: if the boards and c-suites were still overwhelmingly White, what did it matter if we’d had a seminar on microaggressions?
When I put the question to a longtime DEI practitioner, a Black man who has worked in both private and public sector roles, he told me the frustration was understandable. And he acknowledged that he, and other practitioners he respected, were definitely aware of consultants who started cashing in during the summer of 2020 — with little respect for the work they were doing or the employees they were working with.
We talked, by analogy, about the common experience of having an older relative who has actually changed some of their racist, homophobic, or chauvinist views. It’s often hard to pinpoint the exact moment it happens. And, we agreed, it rarely seems to come as a direct response to an ultimatum.
“You don’t want an apology at gunpoint,” another DEI practitioner told me.
A mixed-race woman who currently works for a New York finance company, she told me when she was hired she had to set realistic expectations for her employers.
“One of my employers, he told me a story about how his father had been in the Klan as a young man in South Carolina, and went on to work for [Strom] Thurmond, I think. One of those types. He was out Marlin fishing and there was an accident and he nearly drowned. So, Coast Guard picked him up, and it was a Black man, an ensign or whatever they are, who actually pulled him out of the water. He must have thrown up his racism along with the seawater, because after that he was a born-again ally. It’s a great story,” she told me. “But, I had to tell them, what I do, it’s not that. There’s no Hallmark movie moment. It’s a process.”
Now, obviously not every DEI critic I spoke to would have been happy if only they’d had more inclusivity training. But I think it’s fair to say a fair number of people had experienced a kind of ham-fisted and unproductive training that left them confused, annoyed, or embittered. And, unfortunately, that means if someone else comes around later, and tries to do a better job, they’re running into some learned resistance.
Punching Up
So, going back to the core question, what should organizations do to make sure that everyone has a seat at the table, a chance to have their voice heard, and an equal shot at doing meaningful work?
From my conversations, a lot of that comes down to culture – be it in a police department, a University department, or a Fortune 500 office. Racism and racists exist, but in my conversations that was rarely the only problem. Racism seemed to thrive where morale was low, employees weren’t treated well, and HR seemed incapable of holding people accountable.
As one University employee, a Black man who formerly worked in tech, told me, “I can’t really think of a job where I had a boss who was, like, great, except he was racist. Like, ‘Oh, Gary’s the best, like super chill, sucks that he uses the n-word so much.’ That’s not really been a thing for me. Like it’s usually, ‘the workplace sucks, the boss is an asshole, the vibes are trash.’ It’s a shitty job. That’s the problem: it’s a shitty job.”
That doesn’t mean there won’t be issues. A lot of people told me they had experienced plenty of insults — often unintentionally, as the result of ignorance. Compliments that felt off, assumptions that probably should have been Googled at home before making it to the workplace, or — most commonly — jokes that quite land.
At workplaces with a good culture, where employees felt a certain degree of respect, belonging, and equality — it was far easier to laugh off “microaggressions.” But, many people told me, when there were already deeper issues, these incidents tended to compound and fester.
It’s worth lingering on the idea of jokes for just a moment longer — both because it came up, a lot, and because it provided a key insight into where people disagreed. It’s not an accident that so much of our current cultural debate is about comedy: who can joke about what? Who gets canceled — and who gets redeemed?
It might not immediately seem like part of the DEI conversation, but I assure you, if you spend enough time talking about it, it really is.
Jokes — and humor in general — are obviously a big part of what it means to be human. It’s part of how we bond, how we cope with stress, and how we make the grimmer realities of our life psychologically manageable. Sometimes jokes are harmless, ephemeral. But sometimes, we joke about some pretty dark stuff. Teachers in break rooms, line cooks during the dinner rush, nurses in a hospital ER, soldiers at a firebase — yes, even journalists in the newsroom, we’ve all told some jokes that aren’t fit for polite company.
In workplaces, classrooms, and other spaces where people felt equal, jokes — even dumb, crass, or rude jokes — were less likely to land badly because people seemed less likely to feel like anyone was punching down. When I was a line cook, for example, we were at the bottom of the food chain — self-described dirtbags, the lumpenproletariat — so there was no one below us to punch down at. In the newsroom, our jokes are mostly punching up at things beyond our control — the federal government, oligarchs, existential crises, and even major mainstream media outlets — in a way that’s not likely to cause any collateral damage on the news team.
And these ideas, of punching up or down, and who ranked where, and who arbitrated those rankings — that came up in conversations about DEI over and over again.
There is a sentiment I heard mostly from White people, and particularly men, that they were being held to an unfair standard, that they “weren’t allowed to say anything anymore,” or that their jokes were being twisted through the lens of a racialized history they had no role in. And there was a sense among some marginalized people that many White men were — deliberately or not — ignoring present-day conditions, pretending to be joking amongst equals when, to them, that was demonstrably not the case.
In the most pointed conversations I had, people told me they felt that many White men refused to acknowledge how jokes could lead to violence, how — by belittling and dehumanizing minorities, trans people, immigrants, and others — it paves the road for people to contemplate violence against those groups.
The extreme form of this argument, which collapses saying and doing, language and action, under the broad category of structural violence is easy for some to mock as a type of academic excess. Believe me, as a recovering academic, I know: I’ve heard parking meters called “structural violence” against the poor, and Skittles called “structurally racist” because of higher rates of diabetes in the Black population. These claims aren’t completely wrong, but they’re flattening to the point of becoming a though-terminating cliche.
On the other hand, “It’s just a joke,” also flattens a complex social reality into a cartoon. It’s an unserious defense of a serious situation.
And that situation, for comedy, for DEI, and much of our culture war front lines, is equity.
Equity, Iniquity, and Ketchup Sandwiches
There are plenty of different definitions of equity, but I’ll give you one that most people I spoke with agreed on: equity is the idea that you need to calibrate how you treat someone based on their circumstances, including socio-economic status and identity, as opposed to equality, which is a neutral standard applied to everyone.
That’s not to say everyone agreed equity is a good thing, or a policy that should be embraced by employers, banks, schools, the criminal justice system, or media. While people broadly agreed that diversity and inclusion were good things (on paper, at least), there was a significant — and at times, profoundly ideological — gulf between liberals and conservatives when it came to equity.
Last year, during the GOP primary for the New Hanover County school board, candidate Nikki Bascome addressed the issue.
“Diversity and inclusion [are] extremely important. I think where we go wrong is equity. Equity is trying to change the outcome. I was born and raised in a low-income family, I ate ketchup sandwiches, because that's all we could afford. If equity would have been put in place then, and they were trying to change my outcome, I wouldn't be half the person that I am today. I learned how to work hard. I learned the value of money. And I learned to not eat ketchup sandwiches anymore,” Bascome said.
At the time, many conservative candidates were conflating all three parts of DEI — and sometimes related concepts like social-emotional learning and critical race theory — into one big morass of ‘liberal indoctrination.’ But Bascome was more nuanced, referencing her years of work with Surfers Healing, a nonprofit that works with autistic children.
I’ve joked with Bascome that maybe her ketchup sandwich allegory wasn’t the best gloss on the complicated intersection of ideas underlying equity. But it does get a common complaint I heard from conservatives about equity — that it was trying to change or engineer the outcome. Bascome’s is just one take on equity. I’ve heard it called (and sometimes mocked as) the ‘bootstrapping’ theory, which suggests that equity — or the attempt to provide something ‘extra’ for people who are struggling more — is antithetical to personal growth.
Some took a religious approach to this, calling struggle “the forge of faith,” as one older Black man told me. Others had hustle-and-grind attitude, “steel sharpens steel,” one White man told me, adding that he’d grown up incredibly poor in rural North Carolina, and that “soft times make soft men.”
I heard a variation on this from older generations who had been part of the Civil Rights or LGBTQ movement. With some prodding, some would admit they felt that when times were harder, marginalized people had risen to the challenge.
“Stonewall produced some bad bitches,” one Black woman told me. “Where them Stonewall bitches at now when we need them?”
“I’m not celebrating what happened to us. But I celebrate how we handled it, how our community came together,” another, older Black woman said.
A lot of people from marginalized backgrounds said they’d faced adversity — and many said they didn’t want any special treatment. “Just treat me the same as anyone else,” was a common refrain.
The desire to treat people — and be treated — equally, in a race-blind way based on merit, was what I heard from the overwhelming majority of people. It was nearly ubiquitous. That is the world almost everyone I spoke with wants to live in.
But, to be really clear, between the world we want to live and the world we do live in — there’s a world of difference.
The facts are stark: in the United States, socioeconomic disparity overwhelmingly correlates with race. After generations of slavery, Jim Crow, and racist housing, banking, educational, and employment policies — and practices (not every racist policy was officially on the books, after all) — Black people, statistically, are behind in terms of generational wealth, small business development, multi-generational college attendance, and host of other markers.
Many conservatives got frustrated with me when I brought up “the past,” writ large, noting that none of the policies are on the books now. But many would argue that racism is still very much alive and well. I’m one of them, since I’ve seen it firsthand, reported on it for Port City Daily and WHQR, and dealt with the backlash from racists who were mad I’d played some role in exposing their fellow bigots.
Even if you could argue that the last racist day has passed — and many try very hard to make that claim — you’d still have to account for the generational inequality left in the wake of hundreds of years of bigotry and oppression.
This doesn’t mean that there aren’t White people — or Hispanics, or Asians — who have struggled. It doesn’t mean that women didn’t struggle to get the vote or basic socioeconomic equality (not until 1974 could a woman get a credit card). It doesn’t mean there aren’t other histories of oppression — yes, the Irish faced discrimination, yes, Italians were locked up during World War II — that received less attention.
And it doesn’t mean that things haven’t improved, not just for Blacks but for a lot of minority groups. I spoke with many Black and queer people who acknowledged that, overall, things had improved over the last three decades — although many were quick to note that they also felt a regressive moment was always “one election away,” as one person told me, presciently, in November.
Conservatives I talked to often cherry-picked the worst excesses of the academic and activist left — Ibram X. Kendi being the most commonly named — who they felt painted a distorted image of modern race relations. On the other hand, the media — they correctly noted — sometimes did less work to fact-check some of these claims than they did to debunk conservative exaggerations.
Some conservatives have told me, quite plainly, that they feel the present-day focus on racial inequality and racism is part of a grift economy, ginning up racial grievances so they can ‘intervene’ as consultants. Others feel like identity politics has taken up the mantle of Marxism in a concerted effort to wage endless struggle against the American ideals of Christianity, the family, and the free market. I can say, if you want, you can absolutely find academics who write this way; I know, because they were my colleagues for the decade I spent in the Ivory Tower. But I think it’s trickier to prove how far beyond the college campus their influence extends.
(Whether some of my post-structuralist colleagues actually believe the contorted things they’ve written and said or are just riding the wave of pseudo-intellectual ‘Theory’ in academics, that’s a topic for a very different Sunday Edition.)
But setting aside legitimate concerns about distorted or overshadowed narratives — and also ‘whattabouts’ deliberately geared to derail, not expand, the conversation — it’s very hard to take someone seriously when they claim that every child born in the United States right now is starting from an equal place, allowing each to compete on a level, race-blind playing field.
I know I’ll lose some people from this conversation at this point, but maybe that’s ok. There are still plenty of people who share this ground truth. But those people do differ on key questions: what do we do to make the world we live in look more like the world we want to live in? Who is responsible for doing that work? And how will we know when the ‘struggle’ has been overcome?
In some cases, when the stakes are lower, there’s less friction than you might imagine. Take the dramatic racial disparities at UNCW — known by many, and not for nothing, as “UNC-White.” Several years ago, I covered a federal lawsuit, where it was shown the University was doing an abysmal job of recruiting Black faculty and especially Black students.
This was not like the Harvard admissions case. It was about reaching out to young Black students in southeastern North Carolina and letting them know college was a thing — something they could achieve. It wasn’t about scholarships specifically for Black students or factoring race into applications (most potential Black students meet the college’s minimum requirements). And most importantly, it wasn’t about turning away other students — White, Asian, or Hispanic — to artificially engineer a demographic parity. And, not surprisingly, when I spoke to people about the situation, conservatives and liberals alike agreed, UNCW should do more to encourage Black students to apply and get the solid education the university provides.
And that’s one of the key issues: if Black students win at UNCW, no one else has to lose.
But many other situations aren’t open-ended like this. They are, instead, framed as a zero-sum game. Talking to conservatives, I heard a couple of key examples that had provoked lingering frustration, including hiring quotas at large companies, and the implication that local governments — New Hanover County in particular — were aiming to overrepresent Black employees.
I also heard frustration that schools — including New Hanover County Schools — were spending disproportionately too much time helping Black students, not based on ability or need, but race alone. These claims, I will say, were very difficult to vet, and it’s hard to treat them more seriously than anecdotal. But other concerns, about scholarships for students of color, were easier to understand from the perspective of a low-income White family.
Another example I heard over and over again was about the Biden administration’s decision to prioritize Covid vaccinations for Black and other minority communities instead of basing the roll-out on health risk factors. Some doctors argued that race was a functional correlate for socioeconomic determinants of health, but the focus on race seemingly involved situations where healthy, young Black people were prioritized over older higher-risk White people. “Risk, not race,” was a key takeaway from many other doctors, including the American Public Health Association. (Yes, this conversation did go into some strange lacunae when the people criticizing Biden’s decision also believed various vaccine or Covid conspiracy theories.)
At the same time, I often heard from people that it was a matter of degree. If Black residents got a vaccine a few days early, if a little more money went to Black students, if some other program shifted its priorities slightly, people often didn't mind that much.
When we were being very candid, and put it plainly — sometimes people are asked to get a little less, so that people who need it can have a little more — people didn't riot or pull out their hair, regardless of their ideological beliefs. More often, people asked not to be blamed for past bigotry rather than to have no role in helping address its modern-day fallout. (One low-income single White mother said, "the idea that if I don't spend all day being an anti-racist, that I'm a monster if I don't do that, instead of working two jobs and raising kids, what do I say to that? It's insane.")
Nuance matters. Context matters. And that's largely been absent from the conversation, except when you get very personal and very honest, one-on-one.
So, that's where I'll leave this edition: we need better disagreements. We need more transparency about how we feel and why we feel it. There's probably not been a time in recent history when it's been harder for people to decock their guns and stand down. I'm not saying it will be easy. I'm saying I hope we can try.
I'm sure you'll have something to say about that, about all of this, and so in a coming edition, I'll be responding to your feedback. Because as much as I've written about this (and it is, I acknowledge, a lot), I think the conversation still has a long way to go.
