More DEI! Louder!

Racism has turned a corporate buzzword into a moral imperative.

Portland, August 2020.

Donald Trump is a racist. Has been for decades. This is a man who refused to apologize for calling for the execution of the young black men dubbed the “Central Park Five” even after they were exonerated. Trump, the politician, has attracted and surrounded himself with racists who approve of his views. His first term was racist. Remember the Muslim Ban? Wow! That was racist.

Today, the Trump administration is a racist organization. It exists to put into effect policies that arise due to racism. The president has called out the National Guard into the streets of Washington, which has a black mayor, and Los Angeles, which has a black mayor, and is vowing to send more troops into cities that he believes to be dirty and crime-ridden, including Oakland, which has a black mayor, and Baltimore, which has a black mayor, and Chicago, which has a black mayor. Trump routinely singles out black political opponents as “low IQ people,” and his administration has purged black officials from all corners of government. They are re-erecting Confederate monuments, and renaming military bases after Confederate generals. They are relitigating slavery. And, of course, there is the swelling nationwide epidemic of brown people being violently snatched off the streets and summarily banished from the country due to the administration’s racist quest to rid America of immigrants. Short of burning a cross in front of the Lincoln Monument, there is little that the White House could do to more clearly signal its unapologetic racist nature.

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I often find the public’s outrage at the media’s coverage of Trump to be a little tedious—an understandable but useless attempt to impose order on our chaotic world by complaining about those who are telling us about the bad things, because those who are doing the bad things will not listen. I do, however, believe that the tortured refusal by much of the press to call this racist administration racist has a genuine social cost. It admits racist policies, racist speech, and racist motivations into the pantheon of normal politics. It bestows a legitimacy upon racist actions that they do not deserve.

None of this is news. The question for many goodhearted people across America is: What to do about it? Apart from the broader effort to defeat Republicans at the polls, what can be done to push back against the revival of overt racism in American society, when the government is fully controlled by racists?

I didn’t used to like the term “DEI.” It was a cold and corporate term, a product of more concrete concepts like “civil rights” and “racial justice” being subjected to the ideological rock tumbler of capitalism and emerging as something bland enough to fit even the least radical palates.

But you know what? I’ve changed my mind. Now I like it. The fact that a concept as tepid as “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” caused our nation’s racists to become so enraged that the backlash to it threatens to end the American democratic experiment once and for all has made me reassess the virtues of the term. If this utterly unthreatening, HR-crafted version of basic fairness and minimal consciousness of history was enough to cause millions of middle-aged office workers to accept “rebuilding the Confederacy” in order to get out of having to potentially hire a non-white person for the VP of Sales position, the concept must be more potent than I thought. So bring it on, baby. DEI is not dead. The time to roll out bold new DEI programs everywhere is now.

Let me say this in a slightly more sober way. Even though the Trump administration has done a remarkable job of enforcing racist ideological consistency within the government, their desire to do the same in the private sector is much more tenuous. There, they do not directly control hiring, firing, and policies; there, they have to rely on the secondhand effect of intimidation. Thus far, that has been enough. Corporate America, whose commitment to justice was always disingenuous, acquiesced to the whole “anti-woke” campaign immediately. (Most big companies were probably relieved to be able to save money by firing their diversity departments and by being relieved of the threat of discrimination lawsuits at the same time.) Institutions with more noble purposes—universities, law firms, foundations, etc.—have also folded en masse. Harvard is pulling down Black Lives Matter signs, for fuck’s sake. An entire nation full of middle managers who just a few short years ago were speaking like Harriet Tubman have had their masks yanked off, Scooby Doo-style, to reveal the pathetic little bureaucrats inside.

More of this (unironically).

This sort of cowardice is a choice. Many of our biggest institutions, the ones that receive millions of dollars in federal money and do lots of business with the government, have given in because they feel they must do so in the name of self-preservation. Years from now, when the political winds change, they will look back on their actions with shame. But there is no reason that all the rest of us need to wait that long. There is an entire universe of smaller businesses and schools and institutions of all types that can proudly fly the DEI flag right now.

What is stopping a restaurant, a law firm, an elementary school, a fire department, a small or medium-sized business of any sort, from declaring that you embrace the values of diversity, and equity, and inclusion? Nothing. Nothing is stopping them, except either secondhand fear, or a legitimate dislike of those values. There are millions of small business owners in America who are good people with good hearts who are as dismayed as everyone else at the racist policies of our government. Perhaps you, as someone who worked hard to start a cafe or a moving company or an insurance brokerage or an architecture firm, have never really had time for a lot of performative political actions. Perhaps you have voted well and lived your life in accordance with good values but have not seen the point of involving yourself or your business in what are often dismissed as “culture wars.” Perhaps you have acted in the spirit of diversity, equity, and inclusion without making a big deal out of it.

Well: Now is the time to make a big deal out of it. Now is the time to put up that Pride flag. Now is the time to put that BLM banner in the window. Now is the time to institute strong diversity policies at your business, and to make it point to pursue diversity in hiring in promotion. Now is the time for both the substance and the spectacle of DEI, anti-racism, civil rights, or whatever term you might prefer. Because now, unlike a few years ago, the conventional wisdom has shifted. Now, doing these things does not check a box that will protect you from criticism; instead, doing these things implies the possibility of a cost. A few years ago, I’m sure, many small business owners who believed in the underlying values of DEI rolled their eyes at the performative corporate nature of it all, and shrugged off the need to publicly participate in what appeared to be just the latest bullshit trend.

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Times have changed. Today, the advances of the civil rights movement are under attack, unapologetic racism has wormed its way back into polite society, and masked secret police roam the streets of our cities trying to snatch up our friends and neighbors, destroy the lives they have built, and throw them out of the country. These things flourish in direct proportion to the lack of opposition to them. In the recent past, a normal business owner in a normal place could be forgiven for thinking that it would be a little ridiculous to stand up and say, “In this [BAR/ OFFICE/ PHARMACY/ TIRE SHOP] we believe that racism is bad and diversity is good.” When those values were things that seemed to be taken for granted by society at large, it certainly would not have seemed like a pressing need to put them on the sign in front of your laundromat.

Times have changed! I am unironically and in total seriousness asking the small business owners of America to publicly embrace DEI today—not only because it seeks to do something just, but as a signal to your community that the values that “we all believed in” a few minutes ago are things that we all still believe in. The fact that it may feel a little uncomfortable to do so in today’s environment is exactly the reason why it is necessary. Having diversity within an organization has legitimate business advantages (and the potential scale of these advantages will only increase as more bigoted companies give up on the practice). Equity and inclusion are obligations we all carry, given the history of this country, and are kindergarten-level common sense values besides. And the more goading and horrific the racism of our government becomes, the more urgent the need to speak and act against it.

The most loathsome people in America—the ones who are going to be the villains in the history books of the future—are obsessed with eradicating “DEI.” That’s a damn good piece of evidence in its favor. Lean into DEI, right now! If you wait until it’s easy again, it might be too late.

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Also

• Related reading: Talk Louder About Defunding the Police; This Land Is Not Your Land; What to Get in the Next Uprising.

• A couple of weeks ago, Vox Media laid off 15 of my WGAE union colleagues at Eater, Punch, and Thrillist. If you would like to support these laid-off journalists, you can find a fundraiser for them here.

• Tomorrow evening, August 25 at 7 pm, I’m speaking at a Brooklyn Web Workers event about tech, labor, and anti-fascism—tickets here. And next Sunday, August 31 at 11 a.m., I’m giving a Labor Day speech about how the labor movement can fight fascism at the NY Society for Ethical Culture—event info here. I wrote a book about the labor movement called “The Hammer,” which you can order here, and you can also buy an incredibly cool-looking How Things Work t-shirt right here. If anyone comes to both events with a book and a t-shirt on I will give you a big kiss. Not really. But I will be full of admiration!