Diversity consultants told NR the industry needs to be reformed after being hijacked by activists who took it in a divisive direction.
If in the end President Donald Trump managed to kill the diversity, equity, and inclusion field with a series of sweeping executive orders in the first hours of his new administration, diversity trainer James O. Rodgers has a simple response: “Great.”
The Georgia-based consultant has been leading corporate diversity trainings for decades, with a focus on helping organizations build strong teams out of their increasingly diverse workforces. He calls what he does “diversity management,” which was never intended empower one group over another or to pit alleged oppressors versus the oppressed.
“The work I did,” he said, “was intended to benefit everybody.”
But Rodgers contends that in recent years — particularly after George Floyd’s killing in 2020 — his style of diversity work was “hijacked” by social-justice advocates who used similar language to push DEI programs aimed at benefiting certain minority groups over others.
“It’s gotten to a place where it’s naturally divisive,” Rodgers told National Review. “My take is, the enemies of DEI are doing DEI a favor by getting rid of it.”
Rodgers’s perspective is likely out of step with most diversity and inclusion professionals who sprouted up and multiplied in government agencies, private companies, and DEI consulting firms in the wake of 2020’s racial-justice protests and riots. But other diversity trainers and consultants who spoke with National Review agreed that DEI, as it has been interpreted and implemented in recent years, has been problematic and is in need of being reframed.
“A lot of what happened after George Floyd was not the things that we normally teach in our program,” said Leah Smiley, president and founder of the Indiana-based Institute for Diversity Certification, which trains and certifies DEI professionals. She described some of the divisive language that DEI trainers used in recent years as “cringy” and said some practices, like instituting hiring quotas and hosting segregated trainings, were likely illegal.
“There were a lot of things that were going on that shouldn’t have happened, and certainly some of the pushback is justified,” Smiley acknowledged.
Trump’s orders purging DEI from the federal government, putting federal diversity workers on leave, and leaning on private companies and government contractors to similarly weed out discriminatory practices has left many DEI workers and leaders on edge. An Oakland-based consultant, for example, told the San Francisco Standard that her firm is “bracing for a dramatic shrinkage” in its portfolio, while the head of a diversity-focused startup questioned whether, through Trump’s orders, “our business is deemed illegal.”
Through his orders, Trump directed federal agencies to end racial preferences and to restore “merit-based opportunity” in government. He barred federal contractors from having programs that violate federal anti-discrimination laws, and he directed his agency heads to identify “the most egregious” private-sector DEI practitioners. He also repealed former President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order that directed federal contractors to take “affirmative action” to end racial discrimination. Trump even suggested that the deadly, late-January aircraft collision in Washington D.C. could be related to DEI hiring.
In the days after Trump resumed the presidency, a Washington Post headline declared that he had dealt a “‘death blow’ to DEI and affirmative action.”
Eugene Dilan, a San Francisco-based clinical psychologist whose coaching and consulting firm offers DEI training, said the Post’s headline likely goes too far. DEI isn’t on its deathbed, he said, but “absolutely, we do need to rethink the approach.”
Done right, diversity training can help members of organizations to feel seen, respected, and valued, Dilan said. Organizations, in turn, can benefit in the marketplace from having a workforce with a variety of perspectives and “diverse lived experiences,” he said.
“I think the intent behind DE and I was probably really good,” he said, but “sometimes the idea of inclusion and belonging got lost in the implementation.”
Dilan, who is working on a book on the topic, has compiled a list of more than a dozen reasons why he believes DEI efforts often fail, including: many DEI practitioners never had the training or foundational tools to do the work well, DEI trainings are often pushed from the top down, the trainings are often done as one-offs with no way to measure outcomes, they’re often underfunded, and top organizational leaders often aren’t involved.
Diversity departments, he said, often seem to be “bolted on” the rest of the organization.
“It’s this department that’s all the way back there in the corner. It’s not integrated into strategy,” he said. “So, no wonder it goes nowhere.”
Organizations can benefit by looking for diverse talent in new places, Dilan said, but “sometimes I think people are lazy.” Rather than doing the hard work of broadening their recruiting pipelines for the long term, some leaders simply tried to make their organizations “look right,” which can have harmful, unintended consequences, he said.
“When you’re a person who gets hired, and all eyes are assuming that you are not qualified, this is not a good place to be,” Dilan said. “People want to get hired based on their merit.”
Writing in the Harvard Business Review, diversity consultant Lily Zheng argued recently that status-quo DEI often fails to change bias or reduced prejudice, and can inflame intergroup hostilities and actually “hurt marginalized communities.”
“DEI needs a reset,” wrote Zheng, who advocates for a new framework for diversity in which “all people are set up for success and protected against discrimination.”
“In this moment, leaders and practitioners invested in building healthier workplaces and societies for everyone have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reimagine this work — not only to adapt to a new sociopolitical climate, but to let go of practices that have outlived their usefulness,” Zheng wrote.
Smiley agrees that Trump’s executive orders don’t constitute a “death blow” to the diversity field. She said she doesn’t even view them as a setback.
“I look at it as an opportunity to evolve,” she said.
Much of the DEI work that organizations undertook after 2020 was “performative,” she said.
“A lot of organizations after George Floyd, they just kind of jumped on the bandwagon and said, ‘Hey, we’re just going to do this because everyone else is doing it.’ And they did it incorrectly. They just kind of let people do any old thing,” she said.
“I even had one group that contacted us and said, we want to do a training session and in that training session we want to separate the black and brown employees and the white employees, and we want the black and brown employees to do X, and we want you to do Y with the white employees,” Smiley said. “And we were like, ‘No, we’re not doing that. That is discrimination and you’re going to get yourself in trouble.’”
Speaking to National Public Radio in the days after Trump took office, Alaysia Black-Hackett, the former chief diversity and equity officer for the Department of Labor and a Joe Biden political appointee, defended her office’s equity work. The Biden administration’s “Equity Agenda” attempted to embed identity-based preferences deep in the federal government.
A lot of what she and her former colleagues did, she said, was identify communities that needed additional training or information to create “pathways to good-paying jobs,” and helping workers — including rural farm workers — to fully understand their rights.
Black-Hackett said the federal government needs to reflect on the country as it is today. Attempts by National Review to reach her for comment were unsuccessful.
“When you think about who was in the room during the creation of the Constitution of the United States of America, there was one vantage point, one lens, which was white, male, men,” she told NPR.
Smiley said she was not surprised that Trump took aim at DEI after resuming office, but she was surprised at the “sheer level of … activity that seemed to overwhelm everyone.” The long-term impact of Trump’s executive orders is yet to be seen, she said, though she said she’s still seeing demand for training, even in conservative states like Florida and Texas.
DEI advocates have spent decades embedding their ideas in organizations around the country, Smiley said. “So, what we’re seeing is that unraveling diversity, equity, inclusion, accessibility from these rather hard,” she said.
It may be hard, but rooting DEI as it’s been recently practiced out of the American fabric is necessary, said Rodgers, the diversity coach.
“Donald Trump has done the dirty work. Let him take credit for it,” Rodgers said. “But this is an opportunity for us to reset the direction of the diversity movement and get it back to what it was originally intended to do.”
That includes recruiting for skills and perspective, not skin color and gender. “You’re not looking for brown skin or white skin or gay or straight,” he said. “You’re looking for someone who will add value to the teams that you’re trying to build.”
“Let’s acknowledge the fact, people are diverse, period. There’s nothing you can do about that,” Rodgers said, “so don’t work on diversity, work on getting the best folks in your organization. But once you’ve got them, you’ve got to learn to manage them.”
“And all of them are not alike.”