SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
It was called the summer of racial reckoning.
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UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: George Floyd.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: Say his name.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTER: George Floyd.
UNIDENTIFIED PROTESTERS: Say his name.
DETROW: In the wake of the murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin, protests erupted across the country, calling for an end to police brutality and systemic racism. And as tens of thousands took to the streets, some of America's largest corporations joined the call for racial justice.
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ADRIANA DIAZ: In Nike's new ad, the shoemaker is using its Just Do It brand to say what not to do. Don't turn your back on racism.
NORAH O'DONNELL: Microsoft is joining Amazon and IBM in refusing to sell its facial recognition software to police.
DIAZ: So far, companies have pledged more than $1.7 billion to advance racial justice.
DETROW: They pledged to take a stand against systemic racism, donated millions to organizations that fight for social justice, promised to support businesses run by women, people of color and members of the LGBTQ community. And some companies went a step further, extending the social justice narrative and creating programs to incorporate the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion in hiring, retaining and promoting talent.
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ALEXIS OHANIAN: I have resigned as a member of the Reddit board. I have urged them to fill my seat with a Black candidate.
DETROW: But almost as soon as companies embraced DEI, the landscape of corporate reckoning began to shift.
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GEOFF BENNETT: Diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI programs, are under attack by conservative lawmakers.
UNIDENTIFIED JOURNALIST: Lowe's scrapping their diversity, equity and inclusion programs after facing...
JOE KERNEN: Harley-Davidson is just the latest company to drop diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
DOMINIC CHU: Technology companies, including Alphabet, the parent company of Google, also Meta Platforms, have made big cuts to those DEI programs.
DETROW: Backlash against DEI gained momentum with the June 2023 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that abolished affirmative action admissions in colleges. And while the law only applied to higher learning, it created a legal opening for those who oppose DEI policies in the workplace. I spoke with Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman about this last spring, and he pointed out the affirmative action ruling could stifle companies' ability to consider racial diversity in hiring.
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NOAH FELDMAN: They will no longer tell themselves when they're making a hiring decision, well, if we have two roughly comparable candidates, this candidate adds racial diversity to our workforce, and therefore, we should hire that person because they'll be concerned that the courts will find that to be unlawful discrimination.
DETROW: Over the past four years, many of the companies that so publicly embraced DEI policies have been backing away. What are the politics behind the DEI backlash, and what happens when workplace diversity initiatives are lost? We called up David Glasgow. He's the executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at the NYU School of Law. And I started by asking him to define DEI as he sees it.
DAVID GLASGOW: Yeah. So I think it's helpful to actually pick apart the three letters in the acronym of DEI because they each mean different things. So the D part, for diversity, is really about, you know, diversifying the personnel in a particular institution. So you might focus on hiring, retention or promotion just to make sure that the people at the top of the organization or being brought into the organization kind of match the demographics of the applicant pool or the local labor pool.
The E, for equity, is really about, you know, ensuring basic, you know, fairness in the way that your organizational systems and processes operate, so fairness in things like your employee benefits programs or how you hire people, the work assignments that people get, opportunities for mentorship and the like. And then the I is for inclusion, and that's really about workplace and institutional culture. So do you have the kind of environment where people show up to work each day feeling respected, feeling that their voice is heard, that they're able to contribute their best ideas and be treated well by their colleagues and by their supervisors?
And so together, the acronym is really just about, you know, how do we ensure that in this, you know, diverse, multicultural society that we live in, that, you know, people of a whole variety of different, you know, backgrounds and identities feel that they can, you know, succeed and thrive inside their institutions?
DETROW: What do you think the people that you're observing are getting wrong about this from your point of view and how they're talking about these programs and efforts and what they do?
GLASGOW: So I think the major thing that they're getting wrong is by reducing all of DEI to, you know, what they often call racial preferences. So I think the way that they're framing DEI is that certain groups are getting an unfair advantage over other groups in access to opportunities in the workplace. Whereas, you know, DEI is just such a broad umbrella term that includes a whole range of practices that go well beyond that.
So, you know, if you're an organization that sets, you know, merit-based criteria for recruitment and promotion or has a, you know, structured interview process where you make sure that all candidates are assessed against the same criteria, I would consider that to be a DEI program - right? - even though no one is given any sort of preference or advantage in that kind of a system.
Or if you think about things like, you know, parental leave or flexible work arrangements or childcare support, again, you know, I see that as a DEI sort of program to help, you know, parents of young children and women advance within the organization - or if you do outreach to broaden, you know, candidate pools of people who are applying for jobs at your organization. So I think the biggest mistake that they do - and, you know, I think, honestly, in some cases, it is quite deliberate - is to really zoom in on just the kind of DEI practices that aim to specifically uplift a particular marginalized group in the workplace and then treat that as though that's all of what DEI is.
DETROW: Flip side - what do you think the most legitimate critique of DEI is when it comes to how it has been practiced by large corporations who have thrown a lot of time and effort and resources into the last two years particularly?
GLASGOW: Yeah, so a couple of things. One is that I think, sometimes, it's not implemented with a lot of rigor. I think some organizations will just, you know, rush to implement a kind of one-off, you know, unconscious bias training or something and not really think deeply about the design of the program. You know, who's running it? Is this research backed or not? And so there's a lot of, you know, quality variance. I'm sure a lot of your listeners have sat through, you know, some terrible diversity trainings in their time. So I think that kind of slapdash and unrigorous approach to DEI is one component of it.
And then I think another legitimate criticism is really approaches to DEI that involve, you know, excessive shaming and cancellation. You know, I think one of the seeds of the backlash was planted, you know, many years ago at the peak of what, you know, some people at that time were calling cancel culture, where, you know, a lot of people were feeling really fearful about, you know, if they make one mistake, if they use, you know, a piece of terminology that's out of date that they didn't realize was outdated, that they were going to get, you know, shamed by other people, you know, in their workplaces or in their, you know, schools or what have you. And so I think those kinds of approaches to DEI are not particularly helpful and have just kind of given fuel to the anti-DEI activists' fire.
DETROW: Lastly, as we talk in this moment of several major companies scaling these initiatives back, what do you think the biggest thing that's lost is when a company does do that?
GLASGOW: Well, I think the biggest thing that's lost is the kind of culture that I was describing at the outset of our conversation, where people of all sort of backgrounds and identities feel that they have an opportunity to succeed within the organization. I think what that does is kind of sends a message to people from underrepresented backgrounds in the workplace that maybe, you know, they don't belong there or that they don't have a path to, you know, promotion or a path to succeed within the organization.
And so, yeah, I just think it's incumbent on organizations to, you know, not just consider the risks that are coming from the anti-DEI side, you know, legal and reputational risks, but also really think about the risks from the other side and what's lost if you retreat from DEI.
DETROW: That's David Glasgow, executive director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging at NYU School of Law. Thank you so much.
GLASGOW: Nice to be with you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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