Less than a month after George Floyd’s death, evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience to explain the sentiment behind America’s new reckoning on race. “There’s a cybernetic principle: the purpose of a system is what it does,” he asserted. “Don’t listen to what somebody says that the system is for. Look at what it accomplishes: That’s what it’s for.”
It’s a crucial insight—and a key to understanding our modern arguments surrounding diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Why is DEI on the decline?
Voices more sympathetic to DEI would tell you that many of the DEI initiatives put in place after 2020, from the classroom to the boardroom, were subsumed by the broader system of capitalism and thus robbed of any ability to create meaningful change. In other words, the purpose of the system was what it did, and the almighty dollar beat out attempts to make business better.
Voices on the DEI-critical side would tell you that DEI initiatives were explicitly designed to undermine meritocracy and hurt institutional unity, and that their declining popularity is a symptom of conscious, targeted rejection of their underlying philosophy. So, again, the purpose of the system was what it did, and DEI failed by virtue of its intrinsic aims.
Public perception of diversity, equity, and inclusion has come a long way since 2020. A Bentley-Gallup survey last year showed the annual decline, with support falling every year after peaking at 73% support in 2022. An NBC News survey published in February found public opinion split 49%–48%, largely breaking along political lines. And that’s to say nothing of the absolute cascade of corporations making cuts to, and in some cases outright eliminating, their diversity initiatives. The conversation we need to have right now is about the real effect of the $50 billion corporate America pledged to fix its racism problems. Whom did that money actually help? What problems did it actually solve? Did it do anything at all? And if there isn’t a clear answer to these questions, then it’s worth thinking about whether DEI ever had any purpose to begin with.
Expecting the Best, Judging by the Worst?
I started my investigation by finding someone who would largely disagree with me on DEI: Davidson College professor Issac Bailey. “I struggled with what to say about the post–George Floyd period when corporations were declaring their intent to take these issues seriously,” Bailey tells me. “I wanted to believe them because they were saying it so loudly, that they were on board. But I had my doubts because I had seen this play out a thousand times before.”
In Bailey’s view (and I’ve heard it echoed by many others), diversity initiatives’ tendency to make people uncomfortable is an insurmountable obstacle to their success. As Bailey lays it out: “Something bad happens, discomforting white people. A lot of folks in response say they didn’t know and would do better. The guilt wears off, and it is replaced with rage, and any gains are rolled back. DEI is being judged by its worst practitioners rather than its best. What other movement would survive such a standard?”
But Bailey doesn’t confine his criticism to the shifting sands of offended sensibilities. He openly admits that many corporate DEI programs weren’t exactly designed to be groundbreaking, and therefore not built for reshaping of the corporate space. “It has to be a holistic approach, not bringing in a black motivational speaker or hosting a couple of implicit-bias training sessions and calling it a day,” he maintains. “And it clearly can’t be about making white people feel guilty. That, frankly, is stupid and counterproductive.”
To Bailey, the current retreat from DEI is telling. “It is pretty clear which companies embraced real DEI—which is diversity, equity, AND inclusion, not diversity, equity, OR inclusion—and which didn’t. Those who really believe in that principle are doubling down on real DEI. Those who did it solely for performative reasons are the ones who are backing off this year.”
So has DEI’s fall from grace been a consequence of its design? Or one of imperfect application? Those companies that engaged in performative DEI (all talk and no walk) might explain why corporate DEI programs failed to elevate the “marginalized voices” they maintained were being under-listened to. As per 2023 polling, more than three-quarters of “chief diversity officers” were white, with just over 16% being what would generally be considered underrepresented minorities (non-white, non-Asian).
Given this immense underrepresentation of underrepresented minorities in DEI administrators, it’s hard to say if we should be happy about the flawed industry’s rapid decline or sad about losing the marginal benefits it provided to those underrepresented minorities.
It could be the case, however, that both reactions racialize a conflict that isn’t about race as much as it is about a worldview—one that does nothing to benefit members of “victim” groups unless they espouse progressivism. I’m reminded of the story of Erec Smith, a former DEI trainer who was effectively drummed out of the movement for questioning tenets of “antiracist” philosophy.
The decline of DEI has more often than not been the result of its unforgiving ideology than some white racial backlash.
From Inclusion to Identitarian
Carol Swain, former professor of political science at Vanderbilt University, certainly seems to think DEI’s decline is about ideology—and it’s a debate that goes back much further than the death of George Floyd. “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion is affirmative action on steroids,” she tells me. “The initial diversity that followed [the institution of affirmative action] was focused on outreach and a seeking of talented minorities: equal opportunity, nondiscrimination. What I found was a real focus on getting the best and the brightest.”
To Swain, the pivot away from programs designed to remove obstacles and toward facilitating race-driven outcomes happened during the late 2000s and early 2010s—and she experienced it firsthand. “I divide the world into pre-Obama and post-Obama,” she says. “During the Obama years, there was just so much emphasis on your group identity: You were representing your group. In academia, things started to change for me mostly because I had no value to African American Studies. Because of the way I thought, I had no value to women’s studies. … That’s what diversity became: I was not allowed to just be a black political scientist doing good work.”
That doesn’t sound holistic or particularly productive. And apparently, corporate diversity programs are not all that different.
I sat down with business consultant Tachelle Lawson, who’s worked in the hospitality industry for decades, to discuss whether corporate DEI does any better. But Lawson’s story, too, started in academia, with a story about a DEI certification program she took at Cornell: “I thought it was going to add serious value until I realized the person in HR who was talking to me, who has zero acumen, had the same certification [I was studying for]. I went back onto the website, and I realized it was literally just a form where you give your credit card information.”
For what it’s worth, Lawson has an answer to the who-benefited-from-DEI question. “DEI practitioners, corporate consultants, organizations like Black Lives Matter benefited greatly.” But whether employees, customers, and shareholders benefited—Lawson’s ready to go through the examples.
A $50 Billion Execution Problem?
Few brands are as deeply associated with DEI (and as deeply politicized as a result) as Target. After championing diversity post–George Floyd, the company announced in January its rollback of many of its DEI initiatives and goals. The reversal sparked ire from public figures like Al Sharpton and Pastor Jamal Bryant, as well as a planned 40-day boycott of the retailer. What was Target’s diversity error? A truly incredible combination of over-selling rhetoric and under-delivering on positive results.
“The inclusion was an illusion,” says Lawson, pointing out the disconnect between Target’s initial messaging on DEI as an essential element of “doing business” and the politicization and reputational damage shareholders actually experienced. “Because Target was hardcore on virtue signaling, hardcore on the ‘look at us,’ then shareholders are like, ‘You didn’t tell us that this was this risky!’ That’s not being racist, that’s not being sexist. That’s being a business operator and paying attention to what this is doing to the brand.”
“Not only did Target piss off their shareholders,” emphasizes Lawson, noting a lawsuit accusing Target of misleading them on the risks of their DEI programs, “because they went so hard on the messaging, they pissed off their customers, too.”
But what about brands that are doubling down on DEI in this new world, like Costco? Lawson maintains that it’s not a tenable long-term strategy. “It’s only a matter of time before Costco walks back on their DEI. I think it’ll be a couple of months at best. I also think that statement won’t be as loud as the doubling down.”
When I ask Lawson about what she means by “DEI done right,” she references things like name blind recruitment, where employers focus solely on a candidate’s qualifications to judge initial hireability—notably, not a fix that requires millions of dollars in program development and execution.
To Lawson, far too many DEI advocates never made arguments for why more complicated diversity initiatives—from unconscious-bias training to microaggression prevention—helped with crucial areas of business like revenue, retention, and reputational enhancement, because many initiatives frankly didn’t help.
In the world that exists after peak DEI, says Lawson, companies and institutions are going to have to serve a workforce that’s diverse in background and beliefs without devolving into cheap posturing. “We are becoming more diverse in our beliefs, in our desires, so that’s going to affect the need for products and services.”
Living Post–Peak DEI
So what happens to DEI from here? Academic Carol Swain sees the momentum in higher ed contingent on a major institution being willing to take the plunge on a robust, ideologically non-DEI vision of academia: “All it needs is one major university and a strong personality.” And despite her history with the Ivy League (former Harvard president Claudine Gay’s ousting scandal involved numerous instances of her plagiarizing Swain), she sees a top-down domino effect as a real possibility.
“I think Harvard should be ashamed of itself,” she tells me. “But when it comes to [current president] Alan Garber, I have a reason to expect that he’s probably not on board with what has been taking place at Harvard.”
As for addressing corporate DEI, Tachelle Lawson maintains it’s going to be a slower process—and a longer game than just the next four years. “The next administration determines the true fate of DEI,” she predicts. “Because the previous administration was so far to the left, everything was about DEI, and then this one is so against it, it’s going to be a tug of war for a while. Having a policy that’s determined by who’s in the Oval Office is not sustainable.”
This isn’t the last think piece on DEI, and it certainly won’t be the last. But it’s a plea that we look at the diversity debate with reality glasses on. Corporate America pledged $50 billion to fix racism problems after George Floyd died. Five years later, the only folks we’re absolutely sure benefited from the DEI-ification of American classrooms and boardrooms are … the consultants who taught it, many of whom sold CEOs and HR departments on complicated, unproven theories when simpler fixes arguably would have done more to create healthy diversity. And we absolutely have a list of people and brands and institutions that experienced adverse effects as a result.
If Bret Weinstein is right—if the purpose of a system is what it does—then DEI was a brilliant con.
The lesson to be taken from all this is not as simple as “diversity = bad.” What we’ve witnessed in the past five years has been a tragically expensive experiment that has led to an obvious conclusion: Focusing on race and gender exclusively while ignoring diversity of background, faith, and thought is a nonstarter. And the consultants at the helm of this experiment have, by and large, demonstrated they’re not trustworthy stewards of our institutions.
As our nation becomes more truly diverse, questions about equal treatment and value creation are becoming more important, not less, for the people within those institutions who deserve better than microaggression training and identitarian quotas. And we’ve spent five years getting a crash course in exactly how not to answer them.
