The Inescapable Ambiguity of DEI and Why EDI Works Better
The Case for Equitable Diversity & Inclusion vs. DEI
In late 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, it seemed like D&I or DEI became the most talked about thing in the professional world. Faced with calls and demands from their employees to take greater action against systemic racism and injustice, companies started putting out diversity statements, hiring Chief Diversity Officers, and committing to increasing their financial support for diversity.
My career has directly benefited from this. In September 2020, I was hired at a DEI consulting firm to serve the wave of client interest the entire field of DEI consulting was getting.
To say I was excited to take on this new professional identity, would be an understatement. At the time, I was coming off six months of unsuccessful job hunting. I was trying to transition from a career in public education and nonprofits, barely paying my rent between my California unemployment assistance and the COVID stimulus checks, and generally languishing into pandemic lethargy. You have no idea how happy I was to not only get a job, but this job in particular.
So much of our identity comes from what we do and where we work. It’s the first thing most people share and ask about upon meeting someone new. As a former public school teacher and nonprofit professional, I’d grown accustomed to my answers getting me immediately dismissed or ignored by the professional elite. Nobody cared about my work. But now, with this fancy new title in a world where everyone was talking about DEI - oh how the tables have turned. Now I was the one with the cool job, and it was incredibly affirming. I was excited to introduce myself as a DEI consultant everywhere I went, and I didn’t really think much of the term DEI itself. It was working for me - so why bother?
Fast forward to today, and it’s not working. I’m no longer excited to introduce myself as a DEI consultant. It’s not because I’ve lost interest or faith in my own work, and no I’m not burned out (at least not yet). Instead, it’s because I’m no longer confident that the term “DEI”, in and of itself, serves the purpose it needs to.
To me, DEI has joined the ranks of terms like “cancel culture” and “critical race theory” in that they mean something entirely different depending on the context and the person wielding the term. Cancel culture is either the cure to the lack of accountability for leaders and public figures operating within systems of injustice, or it’s a liberal brainwashing attempt to silence freedom of speech and discourse. It means something entirely different depending on who you’re talking to.
Part of this is because DEI is an open and unrestricted professional identity. Anyone can call themselves a DEI professional, a DEI advocate, etc. Last year I met a facilitator who told me that if we were to be serious about inclusion, we should stop talking about racism and make sure that white folks feel comfortable in our trainings. This year, a Diversity Business Partner at an electric energy company told me they didn’t have a diversity problem despite the fact that they were divided into a White office-based leadership team and a field team of service technicians that were mostly Black and Latinx. “We don’t have a diversity problem, since it all equals out” she said.
The result of this confusion over DEI is not just my own existential crisis in how to introduce myself, it’s a dilution of the work that DEI is meant to do. Executives applaud themselves for hitting their own diversity and inclusion metrics without grappling with any question of larger societal inequities. Diversity consultants and influencers on LinkedIn hurl insults and accusations of inauthenticity at each other. Young professionals seeking to enter the field are confused about what the work actually entails and whether they can truly make an impact without having a very narrowly defined set of skills.
To be clear, I’m not a big fan either of gatekeeping what is or isn’t DEI and who can or can’t call themselves a DEI professional. I’ve looked at the increasingly popular range of DEI training and certification programs out there with an eye of distrust. Credentialing programs are supposed to signal expertise, but more often than not they usually just signal access to money and time - two things marginalized people do not have. And there would be nothing more painfully ironic than historically marginalized people being shut out of the DEI industry.
But if trying to draw boundaries around DEI isn’t the solution, then what is? I’d argue that part of it is the term DEI in and of itself. The literal framing of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.
In their DEI 101 workshops, most trainers try to explain these concepts separately. Diversity is who gets invited to the dance and inclusion is being asked to dance. Equity is who gets to choose the music (or for the more conservative organizations, entirely left out of the calculus and metaphor). What this subsequently sets people up to do, is to think of these metrics as entirely separate entities with no historical basis whatsoever. History is context, and context is everything in our work. The reason we need DEI in the first place, is because of the context of inequity.
My work is not work that is done upon a blank canvas or a neutral foundation. The DEI industry today is what it is because of the murder of George Floyd, but we can trace the story back even further than that. The reason we spend so much time thinking about race is because of the hundreds of years of state-sanctioned violence and exploitation not just in America but around the world on the grounds of race. My work as a DEI consultant does not exist in a vacuum separate from this historical legacy.
This focus on historical context is why I’ve come to gravitate away from Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), and towards Equitable Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) instead. While I’m aware that some use the acronym EDI for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion - mine’s a little bit different.
When we frame Diversity and Inclusion as under the overarching adjective of Equitable, it sets us up to think differently. The wording centers the need for equity to be at the core of all our diversity and inclusion efforts. In doing so, it helps us be more strategic because it encourages us to consider the inequities that we are trying to address. It’s more objective and directed at solving the inequities all around us.
Under this framing of EDI, we can more clearly see that avoiding the mention of racism during DEI training isn’t just ineffective, it’s inequitable. The objective of our workshops isn’t to promote a bland unilateral level of inclusion, it’s to equip participants with the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to undo the hundreds of years of racial inequity. Similarly, a company with White leadership in the comfort of an office and Black and Latinx service providers absolutely has a diversity problem because it is replicating the same racial inequity in power and wealth that has existed for generations in society.
I don’t think this will solve every problem, but I do think that reframing DEI to EDI in this way raises the intellectual rigor of the term, and in doing so encourages anyone who uses it to think a little more critically and carefully about the work they’re doing and the objectives they’re trying to meet.