Why DEI is not the answer

I recently got on a phone call with a mentor of mine in Ethnic Studies at the university. “The interest in DEI work has been really increasing in local organizations,” I shared, with excitement. I started to go on, but he stopped me. “Wait, what’s D.E.I.?” He asked.

DEI, or Diversity, Equity & Inclusion, has recently become a sought-after field of subject matter knowledge aiming to address the inequities made public by the violent police murder of George Floyd in the United States in June of 2020, and the ensuing reckoning around racial and social injustice in all forms. But the field has been around long before today, to such extent that there are a plethora of C-suite positions in major corporations with some sort of DEI-related title, ERGs (employee resource groups) which have become the norm, DEI committees, “inclusion initiatives”, and DEI practitioners, consultants, trainers, etc. In fact, a NY Times article that came out last year unabashedly talks about the ways in which DEI has become a booming industry.

So why is it then, that an otherwise well-educated mentor and faculty member had never heard of this field, especially as it relates to Ethnic Studies, which is the interdisciplinary study of race and ethnicity?

There’s a short answer and a long one. The short answer is that the jargon and conceptualization around DEI largely comes from the corporate world, and the glossaries around corporate terminology keep exploding, with acronyms like D&I, DEI, DE&I, DEIB, DEIP, DEIJ, DEIA&A; the list goes on. It can be hard for anyone not in those circles to keep up.

But there’s a longer and deeper answer. And that is that for too long, DEI has been the end in and of itself for organizations. That to erect a DEI C-suite position, employee resource group, recruitment pool, or book-reading circle, we’ve been seen as “doing the work”. Without a longer-term aim to address the root causes illiciting the need for “DEI” in the first place, organizations have sought to “do the right thing” by demonstrating their commitment to the inputs, processes, and outputs of DEI, with little focused and energy on the desired outcomes of this work.

If we put our focus on the outcomes, like with any intentionally designed strategy, we would ask ourselves, “What problem are we trying to solve?” And call out those problems. Racial injustice. Colonization. Gender inequity. Classism. Abelism. Ageism. The institutionalized ways we have oppressed people. The fact that many people still are not “whole people” in the eyes of our law and government. Structures that continue to perpetuate and enable imbalances in power and the ways in which our organizations have benefited.

Now, I get that having those conversations may seem really lofty and disconnected from an organization’s day-to-day practices. Hard to make the “business case” for having them. But I personally find it hard to align with efforts to fix a crumbling house which everyone acknowledges must start at settling the rocky foundation but decides must start with painting the living room walls. Does the wall painting improve the house? Yes, and we may feel better about the home we’re living in day-to-day. But will it ultimately prevent the house from falling apart? And why aren’t we talking about that?

The takeaway is this: if we don’t talk about the actual root cause of the problems we are trying to solve, we cannot effectively address those problems. If we stop ourselves at, “well, OUR organization can’t fix racial injustice so let’s just start over here in this corner with this thing,” we cut ourselves off from the potential we can have at addressing systemic problems if we put our minds and energy toward it. I have otherwise seen organizations’ missions be about “solving poverty”, “addressing climate change”, “improving public health”, and so on — so it’s not completely out of reach to think that we can direct our organization’s focus at large issues and figure out where our responsibility lies in relation to them. If we continue to poke around at what sounds “good” to do in DEI but does not strategically move marginalized communities forward and continue to uphold the systems that marginalize to begin with, then I suggest that we are doing things, but not necessarily things that cause impact.

So back to my title of this article. Why do I say DEI is not the answer? Because DEI efforts in and of themselves are not the outcome. They are the body of knowledge, processes, and methods by which get to the outcome. The University of Hawaiʻi’s Ethnic Studies program, of which I’m a proud alum, says its goal is to “train our students to imagine and craft responsible and sustainable alternatives to local, regional, national, and global problems” through the lens of social justice, while fostering “thoughtful and compassionate leaders and stewards of the ʻāina.” They’re aware of the big problems at hand, and they know what they’re doing in their corner of the world (i.e. training students) to address those larger, societal issues.

The opportunity for leaders and organizations now is to figure out what those societal outcomes should be, and the organization’s relationship to that, so that anything they employ is strategically designed to address those goals.

Last free tip: if you’re wondering, “well, darn, so how do we know how to do that?” Then make sure you’re seeking guidance from, reading from, and securing your thought leadership in addressing crumbling foundations and not in painting walls. Here’s a helpful toolkit for organizations to start thinking about their outcomes: https://www.heinz.org/UserFiles/Library/Racial_Equity_Outcome_Toolkit.pdf.