Diversity & Inclusion has a polarization problem

“I wish _____ could have been here to see this.” The diversity & inclusion workshop is ending, and spirits are high. Participants share a knowing laugh: everyone knows who _____ is. The mid-level manager who brushes off D&I as “not a priority.” The administrator who loudly complains that D&I initiatives are “ruining meritocracy.” The colleague who makes off-color jokes about people of color, people experiencing homelessness, disabled people; you name it. There’s no way that they’d ever attend a D&I event. Could you imagine? And in the years I’ve spent attending, evaluating, and facilitating D&I workshops for more organizations than I can name, this throwaway comment rings true. I have almost never seen the quintessential “problem employee” step foot in a conventional D&I workshop.

In this essay, I’m going to make the case that D&I workshops as we know it are designed to be unwelcome for people who haven’t bought in to their premise. I’ll start by diving into the most common assumptions embedded into today’s D&I programming. I’ll show how these assumptions can influence D&I programming in ways that can unwittingly can widen the gap in knowledge among employees, create polarization and resentment, and paradoxically, undermine future efforts at inclusion. Finally, I’ll present an alternative framework for D&I programming and explore the implications of adopting it.

Low-Hanging Fruit

As a student organizer and later D&I practitioner at Stanford University, I heard the phrase “low-hanging fruit” often. Those of us who did D&I work on campus used the phrase to refer to people who already had positive intentions to work against injustice, and with some additional information and skills were easily able to become D&I advocates or allies.

Low-hanging fruit, or “allies,” are tempting audiences for D&I programming, simply because of the ratio of effort to impact involved in targeting them. Allies require little convincing that systemic and fundamental inequities exist in the world. They are likely to already believe that the deck is stacked against women, people of color, disabled people, and other minorities. What they lack is typically the language to describe and interact with difference, the skills to organize and advocate, and the facts and statistics to pad out their beliefs. With minimal programming that focuses on language, skills, and information, D&I practitioners can easily empower effective allyship. A few may even decide that D&I is their calling and themselves become D&I practitioners or “diversity champions.”

The Path to Polarization

If there’s anything I’ve taken away from my many years attending, facilitating, observing, and evaluating workshops designed for allies its that in order to build a sense of ingroup solidarity among attendees, D&I practitioners often inadvertently resort to framing D&I issues in terms of “us vs. them.” Attendees are changemakers-, advocates-, and allies-in-training fighting for social justice. They’re up against the biased, prejudiced, close-minded individuals who perpetuate systems of oppression. In these workshops, changemakers — the usgroup — learn how to call out, smack down, respond, and retort to problematic actions taken by their ignorant colleagues — the them group.

Us vs. them is a powerful paradigm, and it’s frankly one that I’ve used plenty myself. For allies, it’s effective at increasing support for D&I, building enthusiasm toward D&I work, and driving repeat engagement. The fundamental problem with this rhetorical framing is that the rest of the organization rarely responds passively to D&I programming that explicitly or implicitly makes enemies of them.

“The rest of the organization” is a pretty diverse bunch. They’re not allies because they wouldn’t go to a D&I training having already bought into the framework, but that doesn’t mean they unilaterally hate ideas like diversity, equity, and inclusion. Some simply don’t care about D&I and don’t understand its importance. Some do care about D&I but are wary and skeptical after a negative experience. Only a small minority of people are actively disdainful of D&I and willing to advocate against it.

When D&I programming depicts this diverse population as monolithic in their ignorance, malice, or prejudice, it inadvertently creates a group out of them. Faced with a laundry list of negative accusations, these employees become more unified against D&I work and those who speak the language of D&I.

As the organization polarizes, with employees being dragged either toward the camp of D&I or the camp of “holdouts”, the “us vs. them” framing becomes increasingly representative of the organization in a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s not always easy to see polarization happening in real time. So-called “holdouts” don’t tend to express their opinions publicly, especially if the organization visibly supports D&I programming. Discontent typically comes out in more private interactions behind closed doors, on private Slack channels, and during social gatherings outside the workplace. Once in a while, holdouts make the news for airing their opinions in a public forum — see the infamous memo circulated by ex-Google engineer James Damore accusing the tech giant of being an “ideological echo chamber.” But these stories don’t crop up too often, and as a result it’s easy to interpret this as evidence that only a few Damores exist in our workplaces. But in my experience working within organizations, I’ve found that the truth is quite the opposite. Holdouts are everywhere, especially in positions of power, and many D&I practitioners are unintentionally radicalizing them.

Undermining Change

I’ve worked with organizational leaders from first-time managers to executives in organizations from tiny startups to Fortune 100 companies. Many of these leaders wouldn’t fall into the camp of “low-hanging fruit,” and unsurprisingly, I’ve heard a similar set of perspectives from them on D&I over the years.

“I don’t like D&I because I don’t like being told what to think.”

“I don’t like D&I because there’s nothing wrong with being a white man.”

“I don’t like D&I because there’s no place for me in it.”

At first I found myself frustrated. How could anyone respond to initiatives to reduce racist discrimination, provide resources for new mothers, and hire diverse leadership with, “there’s nothing wrong with being a white man?” But when I dug deeper, I realized that these leaders fundamentally agreed with the vast majority of the ideas behind these initiatives. They supported fairness of opportunity, and supporting people who faced discrimination. They believed in rewarding hard work and creating equality in their organizations. But they often believed that D&I practitioners — the very practitioners that offhandedly mused about wanting them in their workshops — were out for their blood. Phrases like “social justice,” “praxis,” and “white supremacy” felt to them like coded language targeting their beliefs, identities, and livelihoods.

As a result, these leaders often felt compelled to take a variety of defensive actions. Many refused to comment on or acknowledge the existence of D&I in the hopes that their denial would slow down internal D&I initiatives. Others supported D&I in name to keep up appearances, but refused to allocate funding, visibility, headcount, or other forms of support to empower internal programs. When pressed, they responded that D&I simply “wasn’t a priority.”

At the end of the day, the organizations I work with find themselves at an impasse. D&I advocates train allies to challenge an increasingly intransigent group of holdouts, many of whom control resources and power within the organization. D&I initiatives come and go, yet the quality of life for under-represented minorities stays low and the turnover rate stays high. Internal advocates, seeing few avenues for progress, increasingly take their fight public and challenge the legitimacy of the organization and its leaders. Leaders, their worst fears coming true, engage in crisis management but privately strengthen their distrust of D&I. The probability of true organizational change occurring drops lower.

A Different Way Forward

How can we fix this dynamic? Years ago, I would have echoed the snarky sentiment, “white men just need to get over themselves.” As satisfying and bias-confirming as it is to say, these sorts of statements worsen the problem, not fix it. To break the impasse, we organizational D&I practitioners need to move beyond reductionist models of change toward a different set of strategic goals.

• We need to frame D&I as something that is intrinsically valuable and not remedial.
• We need to make everyone feel like they have a place in a D&I movement that meets people where they’re at.
• We need to take seriously the fears and anxieties that drive D&I resistance and work to create psychologically safe workplaces that allow positive conflict.
• We need to engage with institutional power and see leadership both as drivers and targets of change.

How can we reflect this strategy in our programming?

• Label systems and actions, not people: we’re condemning “racism” and “racist behaviors,” not “racists.”
• Offer separate workshops for allies hoping to become diversity champions, rather than assuming that all workshop attendees want to follow the same track
• Specifically create and facilitate environments free of blame and shame for people less familiar or comfortable with D&I to learn more and ask the “basic” questions

One of the largest implications of this approach is that it forces us to look beyond the low-hanging fruit of allies for our D&I work. It forces us to ask the hard questions like, “what role should conservatives play in this organization?” and “how can we build empathy and understanding among majority groups without burning out under-represented minorities?” These are questions that I’m still exploring myself. What’s clear to me is that our approach thus far hasn’t created the steadily-increasing universal support for D&I that we've wanted. The question left is, "what will?"

This article was originally published in Medium.