\n<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he Trump administration\u2019s \u201cwar on woke\u201d seems to have claimed its biggest victim in DEI. Not so long ago, diversity, equity and inclusion was the favorite term of Fortune 500 CEOs and the political elite. More recently, it has been blamed for everything from the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and the deadly Los Angeles wildfires to the crash between a regional jet and a helicopter in Washington DC.<\/p>\n \u201cDEI means people DIE,\u201d Elon Musk wrote last year.<\/p>\n Alongside culture-war attacks, DEI also became a legal liability after the US supreme court overturned affirmative action in higher education in 2023.<\/p>\n Some of the most powerful companies that once touted their DEI policies have backed away from them. Webpages celebrating diversity have been taken down, teams dedicated to promoting diversity have dissipated and now there is seemingly no one left to defend DEI in its final days.<\/p>\n That\u2019s where Kenji Yoshino and David Glasgow, two law professors at New York University, are stepping in. Both are longtime experts in anti-discrimination law and have spent years consulting leaders on how to make their workplaces more inclusive.<\/p>\n In their new book, How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America, Yoshino and Glasgow argue that the project of equality is far from over \u2013 but it\u2019s in desperate need of a survival plan.<\/p>\n Yoshino and Glasgow spoke to the Guardian recently about the new book and their hope that the essence of DEI can live past the political moment that killed it.<\/p>\n <\/span>How Equality Wins: A New Vision for an Inclusive America.<\/span> Photograph: Courtesy of Simon & Schuster<\/p>\n \u201cDEI itself, as an acronym, is dead,\u201d Yoshino said. \u201cBut the underlying value of equality isn\u2019t. Not by a long shot.\u201d<\/p>\n The authors outline several strategies for equality\u2019s survival. One of the most important is understanding what advocates are actually fighting for and what they\u2019re fighting against.<\/p>\n Opponents say that DEI leads to incompetence. People are hired or given opportunities not because they are qualified, they say, but because of their race or gender.<\/p>\n But the authors posit that reasoning ignores just how biased the hiring process can be. In 1970, before symphony orchestras used screens to hide a musician\u2019s identity during auditions, only 5% of orchestra members were women. By 2016, that number jumped to 35%. That increase didn\u2019t come from the orchestras giving explicit preferences to women, but from the screens, which helped them remove bias from the process. Yoshino and Glasgow call this lifting versus levelling.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of Americans have been kind of deceived into believing that what DEI stands for is a version of race-based affirmative actions,\u201d Yoshino said. \u201cBut that is only a part of DEI, and there are many forms of diversity, equity and inclusion that are completely consistent with the levelling approach, which removes bias from the system, as opposed to the lifting approach, which creates that targeted ramp up to a playing field.\u201d<\/p>\n Yoshino likes to point to a quote from US supreme court chief justice John Roberts, from his written opinion that overturned affirmative action. Roberts wrote: \u201cEliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cI would actually happily sign on to that vision of America,\u201d Yoshino said. \u201cIt\u2019s just that it seems like his notion of symmetry is itself quite asymmetrical, that it gets trotted out as the American value when it benefits the dominant group, and not when it benefits the non-dominant group.\u201d<\/p>\n But despite the movement\u2019s good intentions, Yoshino and Glasgow also encourage tough conversations about where DEI got things wrong, from fostering a culture of shame around disagreement to distracting debates on terminology.<\/p>\n The DEI movement paradoxically ended up becoming exclusive, narrowly focusing on race and gender when allyship could be found across different groups.<\/p>\n Opponents of DEI have been quite successful in \u201cframing DEI as a set of unfair preferences that advantage some groups over other groups\u201d, Glasgow said. \u201cEven if you think that narrative is wrong, it could be very helpful to the cultural debate and the longevity of [equality] to show that actually, we are serious about benefiting everyone with this.\u201d<\/p>\n One strategy, \u201cembrace universality\u201d, points out that though the legal environment after the supreme court\u2019s affirmative action case makes it harder to have targeted programs based on race and gender, programs focused on equality can still exist.<\/p>\n Yoshino and Glasgow have for years offered a course to law students that emphasizes things not typically found in textbooks, like tips on negotiations and written communication. Though they open it to \u201call students with an interest in diversity and inclusion\u201d, the vast majority come from marginalized backgrounds.<\/p>\n This embodies a universality strategy they call \u201ca shift from cohort to content\u201d. Instead of limiting the course to a specific cohort, such as students from a particular race or gender, they focus on content restrictions, which are legally permissible. \u201cThis strategy has already proven to be an amulet against legal liability,\u201d the authors wrote.<\/p>\n Another strategy, \u201cshift from cohort to character\u201d, comes from a loophole the supreme court left universities in its affirmative action decision. The court said that universities could still consider \u201can applicant\u2019s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise\u201d, particularly in a student\u2019s essay.<\/p>\n Yoshino and Glasgow point out this exemption allows organizations to get creative. They could, for example, openly ask candidates in interviews about how race has affected their life \u201cbe it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise\u201d \u2013 exactly as the supreme court allows it.<\/p>\n These strategies and loopholes are more important than ever. DEI\u2019s death is not just coming through the cultural wars, but also from litigation that is attacking the private sector and state and local diversity programs.<\/p>\n Earlier this month, the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which falls under Trump\u2019s executive branch, announced it was investigating Nike over discrimination against white employers. In January, Trump\u2019s justice department sued Minnesota over the state\u2019s affirmative action program for its agencies.<\/p>\n Glasgow said that \u201ceven in the worst-case legal [environment], there are still lots of concrete steps that organizations can take to promote fairness in ways that do not involve the kind of preferences or affirmative action that are subject to litigation\u201d.<\/p>\n Yoshino and Glasgow remain hopeful that DEI can still live on \u2013 maybe not by name, but by purpose \u2013 if people see it as something larger and more important than the cultural wars have framed it to be.<\/p>\n \u201cWe worry that a lot of people associate DEI with just a set of technocratic HR practices, like a bias training when you get onboarded at your new job or having a celebration of a heritage month at your university,\u201d Yoshino said, but DEI ultimately has its origins in the civil rights movement. \u201cIt\u2019s all gone by different names throughout time, but it\u2019s part of efforts to ensure \u2026 that the promise of civil rights is made real in people\u2019s everyday lives and the opportunities they get.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond the social case for equality, there\u2019s also a resounding business case for inclusion in the workplace as the US gets more diverse. Research has shown the US will be a majority-minority country by 2040, a majority of college-educated workers are now women and 25% of gen Z identify as LGBTQ+, Glasgow noted.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really hard to imagine that your workplace, your organization or your community could achieve any of its mission if it wasn\u2019t able to teach its people to work across differences,\u201d he said. \u201cThat means the skills of diversity and inclusion are here to stay.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Trump administration\u2019s \u201cwar on woke\u201d seems to have claimed its biggest victim in DEI. Not so long ago, diversity, equity and inclusion was the favorite term of Fortune 500 CEOs and the political elite. More recently, it has been blamed for everything from the collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44734,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[7847,956,1596,2274,6998,320,257,2879,2082,71,261],"class_list":{"0":"post-44733","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-chart","9":"tag-culture","10":"tag-dead","11":"tag-dei","12":"tag-equality","13":"tag-experts","14":"tag-isnt","15":"tag-path","16":"tag-policies","17":"tag-trumps","18":"tag-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44733","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44733"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44733\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44734"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44733"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44733"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44733"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}