W(h)ither Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

“Diversity” has a strange history as an institutional goal. Standard (pre-)histories of diversity initiatives in the U.S. government and the private sector typically trace their origins to three milestones. The first was President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802 (1941), which prohibited discrimination in defense industries. The second was President Truman’s Executive Order 9981 (1948), which banned discrimination in the Executive Branch and mandated the integration of the U.S. Armed Forces. The third was President Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 (1961), which required Federal contractors to “take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin.” But despite also establishing committees and commissions “in furtherance of said policy,” none of these documents includes the words “diversity,” “equity,” or “inclusion.”

So whence the “DEI” in DEI?

This phrasing, and the industry surrounding it, seem to have emerged almost accidentally from the chaos of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Bakke decision. With no majority opinion, Justice Lewis Powell’s brief and idiosyncratic intervention—though joined by no other member—turned out to be the decisive fifth vote against the University of California. Powell denied that UC Davis’s set-aside program was sufficiently narrowly tailored to pass strict scrutiny but granted that “the goal of achieving a diverse student body” was a compelling state interest. Twenty-five years later, in Grutter, this offhand remark was elevated to the sole constitutionally tolerable basis for affirmative action.

Why does “student body diversity” matter? Though he thought this ideal—which unsurprisingly appears nowhere in the Constitution—compelling, Justice Powell gave it no foundation or justification. That had to wait for Grutter. There, writing for the Court, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor proposed that student body diversity was instrumentally required in order “to cultivate a set of leaders with legitimacy in the eyes of the citizenry,” which legitimacy can be achieved only if “the path to leadership is visibly open to talented and qualified individuals of every race and ethnicity.” This is an interesting and plausible causal hypothesis, and a plausible justification both for the value of the ideal itself, and for its being a “compelling state interest.” Unfortunately, as critics of the diversity rationale have often observed, the more frequently cited justification has to do with the benefit to white law students—who will have been educated in a series of de facto segregated and white-dominated institutions—of being around nonwhite peers and learning how to interact with them so that they will be more successful when they enter a diverse workplace. In this guise, the value of “diversity” ultimately becomes an inversion of the goals that originally motivated affirmative action. As Colin Diver caustically suggests, if that’s the rationale, “then the colleges at least ought to give full disclosure to the minority students, and arguably should pay them for their services.”

But this seems unfair. One of the virtues of “diversity” as a goal is that it is not only about admissions and hiring. Especially when modified by “equity and inclusion”—and even more so, “belonging” or “justice”—DEI asks institutions to continually take a hard look at themselves, their processes, their people, their behavior, and to ask whether these really give everyone an equal chance to thrive and advance.

However, precisely because “DEI” must be embedded within an institution and involves fine-tuning the minutiae of processes, procedures, and culture, it faces two powerful headwinds. The first is, who does the work? Interest convergence theory, developed most famously by the legal scholar Derek Bell, warns that “diversity work” will tend to be done either by those who are acceptable because they pose no real threat to white male power, or by those who pull an unpaid and exhausting second shift at the expense of their own career goals: promise becomes predation. And anyway, in such organizations, diversity will mostly be window dressing.

This points us to the second headwind, namely, enforceability. It’s hard enough to enforce a rule of equal hiring and admissions when there are so many intangibles in such decisions; but how do you enforce the realization and maintenance of a culture of belonging? A lot can go wrong short of a legally actionable “hostile work environment.” The result is that much of the work of implementing DEI ends up being essentially voluntary. And insofar as organizations do implement it seriously, much implementation will be experienced as management-imposed epicycles on familiar processes: box-checking work. Enforcement will, then, be seriously inadequate, but will feel onerous to, and hence generate resentment among, those who need it most.

And it is undoubtedly this last fact that has doomed “DEI.” With the ascendancy of a political movement built on backlash, DEI had to go because some people resent even halting and limited moves toward a culture of belonging in workplaces and schools. Even if “diversity” was never exactly the right target—and anyway had its origins in the rolling back of affirmative action—the ascendant attack on diversity is not an attempt to perfect it.

What, then, can be salvaged in this or a reasonably foreseeable political environment? What ought to be salvaged? What can we learn from the headwinds that DEI faced, and from the limitations of that vision in the first place, so that we can live into the values that DEI programs only partially pointed to? Do these values have a future?

These questions will animate an APA Live webinar on Global Ethics Day, October 15, at 3:30 p.m. Eastern (12:30 Pacific) featuring Linda Martín Alcoff (Hunter College CUNY), Luvell Anderson (University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign), and Noell Birondo (University of Texas at El Paso and chair of the APA Committee on Inclusiveness). The webinar, cosponsored by the APA and the Journal of Applied Philosophy, will provide audience members with an opportunity to hear from and engage with these three scholars and veterans of the struggle. The event is free and open to the public, so APA membership is not required. You are invited!

Avery Kolers

Avery Kolers is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of Louisville. He is Co-Editor of the Journal of Applied Philosophy. His works in applied and political philosophy include A Moral Theory of Solidarity.