Diversity, equity and inclusion.
In some circles, those are bad words and uttering them is like spewing three four-letter cuss words in a row.
There was a time when I viewed those words with hope and promise.
About a decade ago, during my time with a former employer, I took part in a DEI initiative. For weeks, the entire staff participated in group training sessions around diversity, equity and inclusion.
Initially, I thought the sessions would largely revolve around people of color sharing their harsh memories of facing marginalization and discrimination, effectively educating their white counterparts about the realities of living in a Eurocentric, white-dominated society with a long history of oppression.
Indeed, there were conversations where people of color shared heartbreaking stories. Among my examples were being called the N-word, getting stopped by police frequently, seeing my home plummet in value despite spending thousands of dollars for upgrades, meeting in person with sources for the first time who didn’t initially believe I was the reporter with whom they’d spoken, and receiving hate mail from readers who disapproved of stories I’d written about racial inequality.
But the sessions went much deeper than that.
I, too, learned a lot from the conversations.
While life as a Black man in America comes with a heavy burden, I learned that I also live a life of privilege.
In one of the sessions, we walked through all of the ways we’re different from one another by race, ethnicity, gender, age, income, education, religion, immigration status, sexual orientation, disability status, military experience, and other attributes I don’t always consider.
As an able-bodied, heterosexual, college-educated, middle-class, Christian, native-born man, I’m spared from the doubts, fears and misperceptions often faced by individuals living with disabilities, members of the LGBTQ+ community, Jews, Muslims, women, immigrants, those without a college degree or individuals who consider themselves working class.
I learned there are many lines of difference beyond race and ethnicity. And our lack of awareness of the experiences of people who are different from us can lessen our sensitivity to trauma they’ve endured. That ignorance can produce blind spots in how we view their circumstances, conditions and choices of others and, ultimately, manifest as conscious or unconscious bias.
The rationale for DEI training was that a nonprofit organization of diverse employees serving a diverse Chicago region should be in tune with the nuances and intricacies of difference. DEI training would help us understand the different personal experiences and perspectives of our co-workers. The training would also help us collectively build the skills we needed to better understand the inequitable conditions that our organization was committed to address. In short, DEI would not only help us work better together, but it would also improve the quality and effectiveness of our mission-driven work.
It all made sense to me.
But, in the years since, while the promise for what America can accomplish with DEI remains, my hope that we will ever take the necessary steps to realize that promise is beginning to fade.
The lofty goals of DEI have been hijacked — they’ve been overpoliticized and overracialized.
There’s nothing inherently political about creating a space for us to acknowledge the many ways we’re different from one another. There’s nothing Democratic or Republican about examining how those differences affect our perceptions of each other. And there’s nothing liberal or conservative about recognizing the strengths we obtain through a diverse workforce to limit our collective blind spots.
And DEI is not about racial quotas or hiring unqualified people. It isn’t anti-white or anti-male. The training doesn’t choose sides. There are ways in which we’ve all felt marginalized. For sure, there are people who’ve felt it through multiple lanes of identity, but we’ve all felt diminished or overlooked at some point in our lives in some way or another. Tapping into those feelings and recognizing that we’ve all experienced pain due to the ignorance and bias of others could serve as a way we can achieve common ground in spite of our differences.
However, the past few years have shown that — at least, for now — we’re still too comfortable with our hate and indifference. We’re still too susceptible to messages that those who are different from us are our enemies. But the reality, I believe, is that our resistance to finding our commonality is our true enemy. Like the nonprofit organization that introduced me to DEI, our nation can’t work well together nor pursue its mission if its residents remain so focused on and divided by our differences.
Alden Loury is data projects editor for WBEZ and writes a column for the Sun-Times.