A friend of mine is a project manager for a medium-size tech company, and in 2020, when George Floyd and Briona Taylor were murdered and Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests were happening across the country, his company like so many organizations, responded to what appeared to be a growing recognition of racial inequity by white Americans by "investing in DEI," the hastily adopted acronym to group all diversity, equity and inclusion into a much more manageable corporate buzzword.
The tech company, again, like many other organizations, didn't know where these DEI roles would sit within the organizational chart. The roles shifted between the marketing team and the HR team. Other organizations added anti-racist language to their websites or had their boards go through two-hour DEI trainings where they looked at PowerPoint slides illustrating children of various heights needing different-sized steps to watch a baseball game.
There was a world where this was the start of meaningful change. Where leaders began the long process of evaluating how diverse their organizations were, how they distributed opportunities equitably and who had been historically excluded. They also undertook the even longer process of building systems that addressed the gap. However, that introspection would have required self-awareness, and the willingness to sit in discomfort and work on it would have taken time, consistency and follow-through. Instead of teasing out DEI's distinct attributes, we compressed it to make it easier to process and digest.
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