What is Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion?

BY STEVE NUZUM

Image from the official South Carolina Freedom Caucus blog page. Members of the Freedom Caucus are among the sponsors of South Carolina’s anti-DEI bill, H. 3927.

DEI is the latest three-letter acronym anti-public education and anti-diversity efforts have used to define, essentially, everything vaguely bad (whether real or imagined) about efforts to make education, the workplace, and other facets of public life accessible to everyone.  

In 2021, one of the current architects of federal anti-DEI efforts, Chris Rufo, famously wrote, “We have successfully frozen their brand—’critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.”

Rufo was a leader in efforts to turn Critical Race Theory-- a complex academic and legal study, into a simplistic for-it-or-against-it bogeyman-- into “CRT,” a  “brand” instead of a complex set of discussions, allowed by an intellectually free and open society. Many prominent anti-“CRT” activists were of course describing something very different from what Critical Race Theory proponents were actually saying or doing, and often couldn’t define “CRT” at all. (And when anti-”CRT” morphed into anti- “woke,” some couldn’t define what “woke” meant to them, either.)

In the same way, current  moves against “DEI” rarely bother to unpack what the acronym means, or even what the letters stand for. Just as Southern Strategy architect Lee Atwater famously said his goal was to create negative associations about race without saying race, Rufo and others are fairly open about the campaign to use “CRT” or “woke” or “DEI” to conjure the specter of a negative, reactionary vision of diversity efforts. (South Carolina’s leading anti-DEI bill, for example, starts off with a long preamble suggesting that Civil Rights-era legislation essentially solved racism, and that attempts to continue the work begun by the very activists who succeeded in getting that legislation passed are somehow racist or even illegal.)  

So what is DEI, really? 

As you probably know, DEI stands for “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion”.  

In this context, “diversity” usually broadly means a quality of encompassing many different demographic groups, different lived experiences, different perspectives, different religions, etc. (Consider, for example, the message a community sends when it creates a school that reflects the demographics of the neighborhoods around it, while providing all students with the chance to learn from people who are different from themselves.)

“Equity,” then, means the creation (or attempt to create) situations where people from these disparate groups have equal opportunity to achieve-- at school, at work, or in other public spaces. (Consider, for example, the way a well-designed educational accommodation allows a student who is blind or visually impaired access the same literacy curriculum seeing students access.)

And “inclusion” means, generally, making diverse people and groups able to reasonably believe they belong and are accepted in school, the workplace, or other public spaces. (Consider, for example, the way a wheelchair ramp both allows a person who relies on a wheelchair to access a building, and sends a message to that person that they are welcome in that space.)

What are the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion? 

There have been reasonable, rational arguments about the extent to which “DEI” efforts achieve these goals, and about what the scope of these efforts really is, or should be.  Is “DEI” a box to check to avoid real accountability? Or is it a real systemic set of actions to respond to past and ongoing structural inequalities and discrimination? 

At its best, DEI should be more like that second description. And at their best, I think we could label many efforts of the Civil Rights, Women’s Rights, and other pro-egalitarian, open society movements as kinds of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. As with “CRT,” the rhetorical tricks used by those who would completely upend DEI programs revolve around a logical fallacy which goes something like this: if any DEI effort, ever, has fallen short or been counterproductive, the only solution is to end all DEI efforts.  (And, of course, anything DEI critics don’t like can be labeled DEI, making it fair game for attacks.)

What do DEI programs actually do? 

A long list of popular programs many of us take for granted could be labeled as DEI, and are therefore threatened by efforts to overturn or even outlaw DEI programs). These include everything from accessibility requirements (wheelchair ramps, private rooms for nursing babies, braille, language translators, sign language interpreters), to parental leave, to desegregation efforts. 

For example, South Carolina’s House Bill 3927 is written vaguely enough as to threaten essentially any K-12 education program which seeks to provide equal access and accommodations for students based on “race, sex, color, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation”.  This could include everything from explicit staff training on diversity, to active efforts to prevent discrimination against students and staff, to student organizations like GSAs (or any other organizations designed by or for specific groups). Even people who are against “DEI” in the abstract are likely to find that the bill, if passed as written, will outlaw or defund programs that they find positive or non-controversial. 

And while there may, again, be legitimate critiques about the efficacy of specific programs, or about some approaches to achieving these goals, the worst anti-DEI moves are a thinly-veiled rebuke of societal progress. The rest, as South Carolina’s bill does, on the false assumption that racism can only be legally addressed after the fact, and that any attempt to make everyone feel safe and included in school or in the workplace, regardless of their race, gender, or sexual orientation, is somehow illegal.

 You don’t have to support every specific effort labeled as DEI to believe that structural racism, or poverty, or the gender wage gap, or many other real societal problems exist and should be addressed. 

In fact, many of the most strident anti-DEI measures demonstrate, effectively, why we do need these programs. 

Calling a person a  “DEI hire” because they are Black, or LGBTQ+, or a woman, as some of the loudest critics of “DEI” have increasingly done (even going so far as to target predominately Black employees with online lists), shows exactly why society hasn’t moved past its need for programs to address ongoing obstacles to everyone achieving.  Even critics of DEI programs have often acknowledged, for example, that one of the main groups benefiting from DEI programs is white women. This, of course, is only a problem if you are using “diversity” as code for “people of color,” rather than seeing diversity, equity, and inclusion, as a combined effort to remove obstacles to opportunity from anyone’s path. 

Diversity is beneficial for everyone. 

I taught for many years at a school that received funding from a federal grant that was designed to encourage desegregation. As defined in that program, that meant, specifically, that our school needed to attract more white and Asian students through the magnet programs we had designed to diversify the student body, because our student population did not accurately match the demographics of the community. 

Research shows that in schools, diversity is a strength. All students benefit from learning around not only students like themselves, but around students from different backgrounds and experiences. Diversity is good for everyone, and it seems obvious that we can’t prepare students for life in a society where they are likely to encounter people from many different backgrounds, with many different perspectives, without exposing them to diversity in the educational environment.

And educators with whom I’ve spoken are concerned not only about programs that will be explicitly impacted by bans on “DEI,” but by the confusion and chilling effect that are likely to happen because of vaguely-worded proposed legislation like H. 3927, which could potentially endanger any attempts to remedy discrimination based on “race, sex, color, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation”. 

This is all deeply reminiscent of other recently-passed vague culture-war-oriented state legislation. However you feel about “CRT” in the abstract, the state’s ongoing budget proviso (based on a 2020 Trump administration Executive Order inspired directly by Chris Rufo) banning “CRT” has led to mass confusion in schools and school libraries, the banning of books like Dear Martin and Stamped, and a federal lawsuit brought recently by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Similarly, whether you support or don’t support, in theory, specific “DEI” programs, proposed legislation could threaten relatively non-controversial, and deeply important programs benefiting students (and employees) from all walks of life. 

What can you do?

Call, write, or (better yet) meet with your elected state officials and urge them to consider the far-reaching impacts of legislation like H. 3927. For many of the sponsors (which include members of the radical Freedom Caucus, which prominently pushed anti-CRT rhetoric and legislation, going so far as to sue a South Carolina school district over unproven claims that it was engaging in “CRT” instruction), outlawing DEI probably seems mostly like a word game. But whatever their intent, the law, in reality, will likely have the same kinds of chaotic, sweeping, and unpredictable impacts on our schools, students, and education staff, as other recently-passed culture war legislation and regulations.