DEI Died This Year. Maybe It Was Supposed To

President Biden signed two executive orders with the ultimate goal of bolstering diversity efforts within the federal government, opening a door for other companies to follow suit. As workplace culture changed, many Black employees felt a sense of empowerment in their new roles. I certainly did. Those were heavy, and heady, days. I wrote some of my biggest pieces; one of them was eventually made into a documentary for Hulu. For a while, everything seemed like it might work out. “It was the peak of the bell curve,” says Karen Driscoll, a consultant at Raben.

Lybra Clemons was the chief diversity, inclusion, and belonging officer at Twilio at the time. By September 2020, the company announced a commitment to being “anti-racist,” a philosophy that was gaining momentum following the 2019 publication of Ibram X Kendi’s book How to Be an Anti-Racist. “This was a company that built itself on being very open and progressive,” she says. “And the CEO was committed to that vision. And there were other CEOs who were as well. In retrospect, I don’t think anyone really knew how impossible it was.”

Vernā Myers has worked as a diversity consultant for more than 30 years. In 2018, she became Netflix’s first vice president of inclusion strategy. She had always understood DEI, in part, as “the scaffolding that made it more possible” for middle-class people of color to reverse the economic disadvantages they faced. But even in the early days, as anti-Black racism became a national talking point, and conversations that had been put on ice—ones around biased hiring practices, pay equity, and fair organizational frameworks—were suddenly trendy again, she was apprehensive. “You’ve got this horribly devastating event, and you’re thinking, ‘Is this what it took?’” Myers says.

Corporate America, it turned out, wasn’t all that interested in the business of change. “What are the practices that allow you to hire 20 percent more Black people that quickly if you weren’t doing that before? It was positive discrimination,” says Darren Martin Jr., CEO of the consultancy Bold Culture. Many knew that the gains were not a genuine corrective to a broken system, that DEI was branded as a cultural problem when, in actuality, it’s an economic one. It’s only ever been about class, about America deciding who gets to have what and how much. “There was this expectation that you, a 75-year-old company, could somehow install this person and they would resolve all of your cultural ills in a matter of two years,” says Jarvis Sam, a consultant and the former chief DEI officer at Nike.

More than anything, the work took a mental toll. “It was exhausting,” Myers says, and I know the feeling. I remember an assignment where I had to watch, and rewatch, and make sense of, a clip of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, stitching together what meaning I could. The work felt charged, powerful—but, as Myers says, “it comes at a cost.” There’s a moment that still haunts her from this time. “A colleague said to me, ‘It’s like they’re nursing at our tits again.’ Every leader was calling you, ‘What do I say? What do I say? What do I say?’ And little by little, you were giving them the milk and nurturing them.”

Lawson put it another way: “My job was not to cure racism.” Not long after Floyd was killed, the company she was working at tasked her with finding recommendations on how to better support Black employees. “We came up with the real ideas—better pay and promotions. I brought it to the head of HR and they said, ‘None of this seems like it’s going to give us a headline. I need something that’ll help get us a headline.’” That’s when she realized what was actually going on. “The corporate function of DEI is not to actually make things better—it is to pacify.”