On Diversity

I’ve been broadly working in the DEI (or DEIA if you like) sphere for decades now. Most of my work has been coming at it from the accessibility side of things, but I got really involved in allyship and more traditional DEI work starting in 2019. Seeing the current U.S. administration taking an axe to DEI programs in the government and bully private businesses to do the same has me incredibly frustrated, confused, and (yes) angry. I want more equality and more opportunity in the world, not less.

And so, when I was listening to the latest episode of The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart, I was struck by how the left and right may actually be more aligned on DEI than the headlines lead us to believe.

In the episode, Stewart was interviewing former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a Republican. When the topic of DEI came up, they got into a discussion of merit vs. diversity in the context of the Secretary of Defense role. Both agreed that, in terms of merit, General Lloyd Austin was a much better hire than Fox’s former weekend host Pete Hegseth. The fact that Austin is also Black has no more impact on his being a better candidate than the fact that Pete Hegseth being White makes him a worse candidate. What Austin does bring to the table, however, is first-hand knowledge of what it’s like to rise up the ranks as a Black soldier. That’s a significant knowledge gap when it comes to the U.S. military, whose top brass isn’t representative of the diversity of its personnel.

This is something that Christie actually points out when discussing becoming the U.S. Attorney in New Jersey back in 2002:

When I got there, I just did a lot of walking around the office to see, okay, who’s here? Jon, it was the whitest, malest office I had ever been in in my life. And I was coming from private law practice.

He, rightly, saw this as a problem and wanted to address it. He told his staff

[We need] to go out and recruit candidates who are African-American, Latino, Asian, women. Bring them to me. If they’re not good, I’m not going to hire them. But I’m convinced we’re not seeing them.

His approach to address this was perfectly rational and aligned with the approach Jon had discussed mere moments before:

What I found was hiring has a certain inertia to it, right? Generally, the people that started whatever industry or whatever office did, generally hire close to people that resemble them. So I’m not even talking about White/Black. I’m talking about like… I’ll just go with late-night comedy, right?

David Letterman revolutionized late-night comedy. He did it with a lot of Harvard, Lampoon, SNL, same way, writers. The comedy writing industry was for a long time — not necessarily out of malevolence or prejudice — the inertia of it, the status quo of it, was nerdy white dudes from Harvard and the other Ivy Leagues.

But even when we went to like, “Oh, we’re going to do blind submissions,” what we didn’t realize is all the agents are also steeped in that same status quo. So all the resumes — even when we would get them — still predominantly [trails off]. When we went specifically to say — now, this is what you would consider DEI — “Give us not that. Open it up to make sure you give us women, people of color, other writers, so that we can at least see what that is.” And all of a sudden, we found these incredible writers. Now, you could say, “Oh, you put diversity over competence,” but that’s the red herring. We didn’t. We opened up what were stagnant pools. Pools that were incestuous. And we opened up those tributaries. Isn’t that what increases competition, not decreases it?

What’s fascinating here is that they are both making the same point. As Christie says later

We then went about this process of hiring a large number of African-American, Latino, and Asian prosecutors, but I would tell you that every one of them checked both boxes. They checked the box of, “they now look more like the community we represent than we did before.” And these are really good lawyers.

So these two men from very different political viewpoints totally agree on the importance of representation. So where’s the issue?

# The Issue is Tokenism

When Stewart highlighted how aligned their two perspectives were and Christie pushed back, stating that DEI policies were problematic:

I think there have been a number of areas where there are people who hire certain folks just for their diversity. I’ve seen it happen here in New Jersey, in the government since I left. Where people say, “I am going to make sure that I have one of every…” It’s almost like a half a Noah’s Ark. “I’m going to have one of these and one of these and one one of these and one of these.”

Stewart questioned that:

But you just told me that’s what you did in the prosecutor’s office.

But Christie didn’t see it that way:

No, what I did was get them in to interview them. If it turned out, Jon, that they were also really good lawyers, they got hired. I’m talking about something different. I’m talking about predetermining the outcome in the way that you just talked about — and I believe that legacy admissions predetermined the outcome — that there have been some in charge of government across this country who have predetermined determined outcomes and said, “I am going to have this many African-Americans, this many Latinos, this many Asians, this many lesbians, this many gay men…” I think that when people see that, they say to themselves, “That’s not right either.”

What he’s talking about is what I’d call performative DEI. It’s not substantive, but attempts to give off the appearance of being so. It’s the DEI equivalent of greenwashing.

# DEI Cannot be Performative

When people hire folks or celebrate folks for their diversity rather than their diversity plus their competence or talents, it undermines the legitimacy of DEI programs that are attempting to do what they both discussed being important: representation.

As they both said, we need to screen in job applicants who wouldn’t otherwise consider applying for roles in our organizations. Christie talked about this too:

The aha moment for me on that concept and why it was the right way to go was there was a young guy that I hired very early on: African-American, University of Michigan, University of Penn Law School, clerk for Alan Page — the former Minnesota Viking, defensive tackle in the Supreme Court of Minnesota— He’s from New Jersey, grew up in Maplewood. I said to him, “Why didn’t you ever apply here before?” He said, “Because I knew people like me wouldn’t get hired.”

Hiring is just part of the process though. You can widen the applicant funnel and bring in a more representative — which is to say diverse — applicant pool with relatively little effort. Where things often fall short is retention.

# Is Your Organization Even Ready?

If your organization isn’t excited at the prospect of a more diverse workforce and prepared to support them when they are onboarded, you need to press pause and get prepared. Similarly, if your company is eager, but very homogenous, you’ve also got work to do. No one wants to come into a job and feel like “the only” or “the token” anything. And even if they were the most qualified applicant for the position, some jackass will say something that implies they are. It’s a tale as old as time and you need to be prepared for that reality.

The first thing you need to do is educate. You need to help folks on your team understand the gaps in your collective knowledge & experience. They need to see that a more diverse team can help fill those gaps. The data that shows that more diverse organizations are more successful. Share that! I’m guessing most of your team is there because they want your organization to be as successful as possible.

And make sure they understand the historical barriers folks from different communities have faced in getting access to jobs at organizations like yours… even when they were equally or more accomplished than folks from the dominant group. As Stewart said on the show:

It’s not rigging [the system] in a different direction, it’s unrigging it.

It’s also important to note that the process here needs to be inclusive as well… call people in, don’t call them out. Everyone is on their own journey and deserves the space to fail and learn from their mistakes. If someone says something offensive, let them know that it’s offensive and why. Tell them what they should say — if anything — instead.

If you approach people with empathy, you’re much more likely to get a positive response. And, Twitter aside, most folks aren’t out in these streets trying to be trolls. People are a product of their own experiences and those experiences can be quite different from yours. Help your colleagues broaden their perspectives with positive reinforcement, not chastising.

That said, you also need the proper mechanisms in place to address non-inclusive behaviors when they become a pattern or reach a certain threshold of severity. Those mechanisms need to outline the consequences for such behavior. The severity of the consequence needs to align with the severity of the harm, but it may need to escalate in severity for repeat offenses. Depending on the size of your organization, coming up with these policies and consequences could be a group activity to ensure both awareness and buy-in.

# Embrace DEI and Pave the Way for Mediocrity

To be clear, neither Jon Stewart nor the progressive left are pushing for diversity quotas like Christie seems to think they are. But there are folks out there who are. These performative DEI programs have got to go. As my colleague and friend Ebele Okoli says “bake it in, don’t cake it on.”

Don’t hire or promote someone just because you think their headshot would help to melanate your About page. That’s not what DEI is about and it doesn’t help us to reverse the dire course the U.S. government and cowardly companies are taking currently. DEI needs to be a part of every process in your organization on order to give everyone — white men like me included — an equal chance to succeed.

Cast a wide net. Hire and promote for competence and to address the knowledge gaps your team absolutely has. Foster an inclusive workplace that values the different lived experience and perspectives brought to the table by each and every employee. That is how you succeed with DEI. It’s also how DEI will help your organization succeed in its mission and grow to hire more folks.

And as more of the incredibly talented people out there get hired on at organizations like yours, all boats will rise, creating more jobs and space for mediocre people of all stripes to get hired and rise up the ranks too. But they won’t get there just because or who they know, what they look like, or because they tick a particular box on your diversity bingo card.