Do or D.E.I.
Plus SuperBowl ads, and old news about our old president
Me using the Apple Vision Pro MAX in NYC last week at a special demo.
Hi you,
The full version of this newsletter, as usual, is available via subscription at Puck. But I’ve got this edition available to all the people. I’m currently in Pasadena, California about to join a panel for the TV series, Hope In The Water, in which I’m a participant alongside Shailene Woodley, Martha Stewart, and José Andres. Not bad! It’s coming to PBS this summer, so take note.
Happy Black History Month! We get an extra day this year, and I’m still deciding what to do with all that extra Blackness. Hit me up if you have ideas.
Now, here are a few things on my mind.
Department of Injustice: There’s already been endless commentary about special counsel Robert Hur’s report on President Biden’s handling of classified documents. The most relevant news is the determination that Biden won’t be prosecuted. The literally old news is that Biden is old. He knows it, and we all know it. It’s not a position he can change. His age is immutable. His presumptive opponent, Donald Trump, also has some immutable attributes: He’s a twice-impeached, quadruple-indicted, NATO-undermining former president who tried to overturn the election he lost, calls his political opponents “animals,” and who’s been found liable of sexual assault. (He currently owes the victim $83 million for defamation, to boot.) Yesterday I spoke with a former federal prosecutor friend (they are good to have!) and he alerted me to the fact that the F.B.I. has never had a Democrat in charge. These days, it seems like Republicans refuse to be held accountable by Democrats, and Democrats are only held accountable by Republicans. That’s a twisted reality.
Super bad: Some thoughts on the Super Bowl, or should I call it Super Brawl? Okay, not exactly, but the first big play I saw from Travis Kelce featured him shoving his coach and screaming in his face. (I haven’t watched a full NFL game in years.) Meanwhile, Temu, the Chinese discount shopping marketplace and official game sponsor, promised better living through capitalism and told viewers to “shop like a billionaire,” which is silly because billionaires have people who do the shopping for them. Maybe that was meant to be ironic, too. Or maybe the PlutoTV ad portraying Americans as a crop of human couch potatoes suggests Temu is right about us.
But the most bothersome moment for me was the NFL’s “Born to Play” ad, set in Ghana’s vibrant capital of Accra. In the U.S., the league has silenced political expression and concerns about the devastating impact of the sport on the bodies and brains of its (mostly Black) players. So it’s off to Africa for fresh recruits for a business that lacks any team with majority Black ownership. The closing message, in which former player Osi Umenyiora tells a little boy that he was “born to play,” was meant to be uplifting. I just wish the kid could have heard that he was meant to create, or build, or own. That would have been a more inspiring message during Black History Month.
Now the main piece I’ve been working on for a while…
Do or D.E.I.
An inside look at a revolution in retreat: when and where our collective attention faded, the corporations and well-meaning practitioners who dropped the ball, and how we can still change the culture.
When I was in grade school, I had a daily after-school routine before my mother got home from work. I would watch the front window for her arrival, and when I spotted her, quickly turn off the TV, dash over to the kitchen table, and pretend that I had been studying the entire time. I thought it was an ingenious scheme, but it rarely fooled my mother. She was old-school. She hovered her hand over the television, and from its heat, knew that I had been watching.
I remember this moment of motherly magic with fondness, but I also recall it with a sense of sadness. When she crossed the threshold, she was usually “bone tired,” as she would say. She worked as a computer programmer for the federal government. It was somewhat miraculous that she had that job, given her lack of college degree and generational proximity to slavery, Jim Crow, and women’s disenfranchisement.
The job paid better than most, and unlocked countless opportunities for me and my sister—but it also cost our mother greatly. I experienced secondhand the stress she carried as a Black woman in the tech industry during the early 1980s—lower compensation, workplace hostility, and the expectation that she would train her younger, whiter, male colleagues to supersede her. Halfway through my time in college, she accepted a buyout offer, primarily to escape the toxic stress of having to constantly prove her worth. She didn’t get to enjoy her retirement for long. Within a few years, she was diagnosed with colon cancer, and a few years after that, at age 65, she died from the disease.
I’ve been thinking about my mother’s journey a lot lately as we face the loud, politically motivated backlash against programs designed to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (D.E.I.) in workplaces and schools. Lost in the social media screeds, performative “anti-wokeness,” and legislative reversals is the original reason for pursuing D.E.I. in the first place: to prevent the insidious mechanisms of systemic racism, and other forms of exclusion, from keeping people like my mother from being valued for their talents and all of us from benefiting from them.
If I could speak with her today, I would love to tell her that things have gotten unequivocally better. But the limited progress we’ve seen is under fierce attack. As of last month, seven U.S. states have passed laws banning or restricting D.E.I. initiatives at public colleges, and 30 more bills are under consideration elsewhere in the country. Companies that made public commitments to these measures have shifted course, cynically and opportunistically, now that the spotlight has moved away from them. Infuriating examples are everywhere, from Edward Blum’s lawsuit against the Fearless Fund, to the ouster or exit of prominent D.E.I. executives like Karen Horne at Warner Bros. and Latondra Newton at Disney. Hostility against D.E.I. has also been normalized by uber-wealthy keyboard bullies like Bill Ackman, who essentially called former Harvard University president Claudine Gay a diversity hire during his targeting and harassment campaign.
Is there any silver lining here? As Vernā Myers, a longtime D.E.I. strategist and former vice president of inclusion strategy at Netflix told me, “Backlash is our assurance that we’ve been making progress. You don’t have a backlash unless there’s been a movement forward.” And she’s right. For evidence that supports the efficacy of D.E.I., look no further than those well-known bastions of progressive, anti-colonial, woke thinking: the World Economic Forum and McKinsey & Co.
In their 2023 joint report on D.E.I. programs, they found an overwhelming majority of executive leaders and investors were willing to pay a premium to acquire a company with a positive environmental, social, and governance (E.S.G.) record. They found that 39 percent of global job-seekers turned down or decided not to pursue an opportunity because of a perceived lack of inclusion—and unsurprisingly, that preference was even more true for younger employees. And then there was the kicker, which belies the arguments flying out of the anti-D.E.I. pockets of Wall Street: that ethnically and gender diverse companies are more likely—by 36 percent and 25 percent, respectively—to financially outperform organizations of average diversity in their industry. To put it simply, the goal of D.E.I. isn’t to make white men feel threatened; it’s to make all of us more money. There are material economic upsides to maintaining these programs, so where did things go wrong?
Read it all here
In the longer piece I highlight where D.E.I. implementations have gone wrong, what actually works, and how we can explain the seemingly sudden and fierce backlash and its timing.
I spoke with many folks and thanked them for helping me think through this topic. They are also good guideposts for you and your organization as you make your own way along this interdependent path we’re all on. Thank you to Anurima Bhargava, Julie Ann Crommett, Denise Hamilton, Suzanne McKechnie Klahr, Vernā Myers, and Adriele Parker, and to my mother, Arnita Thurston.
If you’re quite desperate the read the full thing and don’t have the funds or can’t figure out the email unlock at Puck, hit me up and stay tuned to see if I do any videos on the topic.
Have a great week.
Back soon!
About ten years ago, I chose DEI as my subject for a grad school research project. As I pored over journal essays, research studies, text book chapters, and magazine articles, I saw the same themes you've mentioned repeated consistently: DEI has to be a core value, not a program, if lasting change is to occur and organizations that accomplish lasting change see tangible benefits in employee retention and performance. Most of the solutions offered were either adjustments to the content of various programs, or to the implementation of these programs, and all of them relied on organizational leaders to fundamentally change themselves and their priorities.
What I did not see then, nor since, is discussion of fundamentally changing organizational structures in order to accomplish DEI goals. Hierarchy is structurally incompatible with diversity. The fewer people with substantial power/authority/autonomy there are in an organization, the more inclusion becomes an exclusionary process.
Anyone who has commuted in a large metro area, or who has encountered a long backup because of highway construction will understand what I mean. You cannot add more cars to a lane of traffic without the cars already there letting them get in front. It's hard enough to get people to slow down for the brief moment required to make room for another car, how much more naturally resistant will people be to a perceived slowdown of their career goals?
Programs, efforts, DEI departments, are all essentially efforts at convincing people that slowing down briefly to make room for another car will ultimately result in everyone moving forward faster. That's true, but it's nowhere nearly as effective as *adding more lanes to the road*. Flattening organizational structures needs to be a central part of the DEI conversation.
There are two obvious benefits to an approach to DEI that revolves around adding seats to the table rather than changing up the demographics of who is at the table:
1. It addresses the fear of replacement.
2. It achieves the organizationally practical, effective advantage of diversity: collaboration.
The research on the benefits of diversity is pretty clear - when people's contributions are appreciated their performance improves and when organizational decisions are made based on input from multiple perspectives their performance improves. Adding seats to the table shows that you value the input of a broader range of people and it puts more voices into the decision making process. One person is not diversity, no matter what demographic check boxes they fill.
Does it seem to you that if 36 percent and 25 percent, respectively— of ethnically and gender-diverse companies financially outperform organizations of average diversity in their industry, then this means shifting the playing field to the shareholders? Of course, the shareholders' meetings generally reflect the views of a particular culture, which is not particularly inclusive, nor interested in more money when getting it conflicts with culture. So - it's necessary to move the playing field back to a place where people who think for the good of the whole have some power. Where is that playing field?