The D.E.I. Blame Game

Hello Pittsburgh tonight! and "trapezoidal clown car"

Everything really is bigger in Texas. This truck, for example. Outside the Fairmont in Austin where I stayed last week in order to deliver a keynote at the WorkHuman Live conference.

Hi you. I crafted this Sunday just getting it to you today,

Before diving into our main story—a close look at what’s lurking beneath the recent wave of D.E.I. hysteria—let’s start with a few items grabbing my attention…

• Attention Pittsburgh! There are still a few tickets left for my event with public television station WQED, in which I’ll talk about my PBS series, America Outdoors, in front of a live audience. It’s happening TONIGHT Tuesday evening from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Come say hi!  

• Like many who work in the media and entertainment industries, I was deeply disappointed to discover that Participant Media is shutting down. (As usual, my partner Matt Belloni has some of the backstory.) I’ve had a long history with Participant, certainly as a fan of many of its films, but also on a more personal level: Until the announcement of its closure, I served on the company’s Impact Advisory Council, which made sure its films had real-world impact. I also got my first-ever live television job on its short-lived Pivot TV network, where I co-hosted TakePart Live with Meghan McCain and Jacob Soboroff (yep, there’s a pic).
  
  Over the years, I gained a lot of perspective from the stories Participant told, and the way it told them. I’m sad to see this champion of meaningful storytelling exit the arena, but I’m confident they laid important groundwork for others to build upon. (For instance, this documentary film about a group of Native American cyclists trying to bring the sport of mountain biking to the Navajo Nation, where no bike shops exist.)

• In the fight against book bans, librarians have been stepping up. I’ve proudly served on the board of the Brooklyn Public Library for many years, and along with Seattle Public Library, they’ve just released a report on the Books Unbanned program. This nationwide initiative is designed to combat the rising trend of book bans and challenges in schools and libraries, especially those targeting books with diverse themes and representation. B.P.L. launched the program in April 2022, with Seattle joining a year later. The program offers free digital library cards to teens and young adults, enabling them to check out books online that their cowardly local politicians have prohibited. 

• Oh, and Elon forced me to wear his verified blue check mark on X. I don’t and won’t pay for X. I maintain a presence there to protect my name, occasionally retweet things, and respond to folks in communities I care about who still operate there. I spend more time on Threads and am playing with the new AirChat. But forcing me to wear that badge feels like a non-consensual relationship move. I’m not trying to wear your varsity letter jacket, dude. I’m just not that into you! Leave me alone! 

• And finally, a palate cleanser: “The rise of the far-right around the world is profoundly troubling, underpinned as it is by dystopian visions of the future and the need for ‘strong’ leaders to protect us from those futures. But what would a Manifesto look like that was based on a positive vision of the future, one that is appropriately ambitious to the scale of the challenges the world is facing while at the same time bold, imaginative and audacious?” This question has been answered in a collection of positive visions of the future titled Ministry of Imagination. It’s based on the 100-episode run of the podcast From What If to What Next, which I had the pleasure of joining as a guest. A few of my ideas are represented among the 600 in the collection, on topics ranging from the economy, to media and communications, to climate change and more.  

And now, brace yourselves. Bridges are falling. Planes are breaking apart. Trains are literally coming off the track. All because of… (checks notes), D.E.I.? 

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The D.E.I. Blame Game

Are panels really flying off Boeing 737s due to wokeness? An honest look at the recent D.E.I. hysteria. 

Full piece in Puck. Some excerpts below.

• Just over a year ago, in March 2023, Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in spectacular fashion. The flurry of official postmortems—the Barr report, the O.I.G. report, and the Bair report—all found that the bank’s board of directors had egregiously failed to consider that, in a rising interest rate environment, the bank’s billions in assets (held in long-dated treasuries and bonds) could not cover the bank’s short-dated liabilities during a mass withdrawal event. Of course, that’s exactly what happened. Alarmed depositors rushed to get their money out, and boom, the third-largest bank run in U.S. history was on. 

• The reality is that SVB imploded because it succumbed to groupthink and didn’t properly manage risk. In the year since, it’s become increasingly commonplace for political and business leaders to use D.E.I. as a scapegoat for virtually every societal, business, or technical failure. Sure, diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts are imperfect—I’ve written about this recently, myself—but over the past year, critics have blamed diversity initiatives for almost everything, almost like witchcraft in 1700s America, while conveniently overlooking the real issues facing our industries. 

• After the deadly Maui wildfires, Vivek Ramaswamy, the most annoying person to ever run for president, posted on X that firefighting delays were caused by “an Obama Foundation ‘Asia Pacific Leader’ & a climate activist who believes water should be ‘revered.’... The DEI agenda is literally costing people their lives.” While the investigation hasn’t concluded, the tragic fires, which claimed 101 lives, seem to have resulted from Hurricane Dora’s intense winds, drought conditions, an overwhelmed fire department facing communications challenges, and possibly downed power lines. In addition to climate change, the radical transformation of Hawaii’s land in the generations since colonization has also made it more susceptible to fires. It’s not the diversity efforts but the transformation of the island’s ecology that’s more likely to blame. 

• Perhaps the most genuinely terrifying trend to emerge over the past year is that our planes are literally falling apart in the air. Thankfully, Elon Musk, the world’s most overstretched C.E.O, has an explanation: “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized D.E.I. hiring over your safety? That is actually happening.” Of course, that’s not actually happening. What has happened is that Boeing, for years, has been deprioritizing its once rigorous safety and compliance standards, cutting corners in manufacturing and maintenance, and pushing for laws that would make it harder for regulators to review its work. Corporate recruiting programs that aim to increase the number of diverse candidates entering the training pipeline isn’t the reason Boeing doors are falling off. To solve that riddle, Elon—who has been charged with overseeing discriminatory working conditions—might want to look at the company’s C-suite. It’s incredible that he has time to peddle conspiracy theories on X when malfunctioning accelerator pedals on his Cybertruck just caused the company to recall every single trapezoidal clown car it’s sold. 

• If these D.E.I. critics genuinely cared about wildfires or airline safety, military readiness or train derailments, they would focus their public comments on climate change, corporate safety culture, and U.S.-Iranian relations. But in making D.E.I. a boogeyman, they’ve created a universal scapegoat that allows two things: First, they get to avoid the difficult work involved with investigating these problems; and second, this facile scapegoat offers a cheap and reliable means of stoking fear and agitating the Republican base. Blaming D.E.I. is not much different than blaming wokeness, C.R.T., affirmative action, political correctness, or even desegregation for society’s problems. The language changes, but what remains the same is the ideology, rooted in white supremacy, that sees anything “other” as less than, and sees expansion of opportunity as a threat to those who already hold power. 

• I’m not willing to commit the same offense. I can acknowledge that D.E.I. initiatives are not always successful, but if you’re a leader who needs D.E.I. to explain a plane failure, rather than a culture of shortcuts and monopolistic business practices, you’re not committed to the “free market” you claim to champion. If you’re ignoring the data that shows that diverse workplaces are literally more profitable, then maybe you’re not actually interested in helping our economy boom. Instead, the reality is that you’re more interested in prioritizing politics over your constituencies, and the society you’ve promised to defend.

Again, Full piece in Puck.

Sending you love in these harsh times. Closing with a recent conversational TED talk that keeps me going through the ugliness to remember the beauty we are capable of.