Love should be the organizing principle of DEI programs
When we understand God’s promise of restoration and transformation as real, we can fully repent of the harm we’ve caused.
There is some evidence that suggests that diversity training (DEI trainings) have sometimes made workplace racism worse, not better. There are a lot of possible reasons for this, not least of which is poorly designed training. I recently heard of a training that simply had employees scroll through a slideshow, state that they had viewed each slide, and then answer some questions. That doesn’t sound particularly compelling to me, and shows that corporate DEI training may be more about fulfilling a legal requirement than attempting to have a meaningful impact on the culture of a company.
Because DEI was in vogue after a series of high-profile police killings like that of George Floyd, many organizations signed up for it in order to save face or to placate their progressive members or employees. It was experienced as simply another demand placed on employees by their supervisors and manager. It didn’t become a tool for collective transformation, but rather, another imposition on workers who were tired of being imposed on. Mandated DEI training felt to many workers like simply another demand, like being forced back to the office, post-COVID.
A related issue is that diversity training failed to explain racism as systemic, rather than personal. White people grew frustrated with the implication that they intended to display bigotry, when they did not. Some of those white people simply refused to hear the experiences of the BIPOC around them. The defensiveness of many white folks, and their ignorance of social history around race is of course very painful for BIPOC. Without effective training, without employee “buy-in,” and with only guilt and hurt feelings as the outcome of DEI training, they were and are bound to fail.
A lot of class-based critics have named issues with DEI training as ignoring the solidarity and common struggle that workers and human beings have as members of the working class. Instead of focusing on those common struggles, they focus on race-related or identity-based struggles, which divides the people, instead of uniting them in a common cause.m. I think that’s a valuable critique, but the solution to that problem isn’t doing away with DEI programs, but also teaching a culture humble seeing how we’ve harmed one another, without being defensive. That culture’s organizing principle is love.
Exercises geared towards learning compassion for the other need to be part of any diversity training. Let’s remember that racism is morally problematic because we want to live in a world in which love—not hatred and fear—of folks we view as “other” is paramount. Simply put, if we desire a culture of peace and harmony, love has to be understood as the powerful force that it is. If we don’t at least aspire to love one another, we cannot expect to address racism. The moral problem of racism is not enough to convict us to solve it—we need operate within an ethic of love.
I am a Christian pastor, and for me, teaching about relating to the Author of Life—God in the person of Jesus Christ—is essential to how we form a culture at church. We learn how to love one another because God loved us enough to defeat death and promise us the forgiveness of sin. What God offers is universal restoration. We are not damned to be sinners, to repeat the harm we’ve learned, to just wallow in our guilt. We don’t need to be defensive when faced with our racism—whether deliberate or not. We have the hope of transformation on our side.
I don’t think most DEI programs in the corporate environment offer such an eschatological vision. It would be naive to expect that. But I, for one, believe that churches and people of faith can offer this perspective. We are, each of us, more than the worst things we’ve done. We don’t need to run away when we have fallen short. We can acknowledge our shortcomings because they don’t fully define us.
We can have grace with ourselves and move toward transformation because God is on our side doing that work with us and has done that work for us. The world will be restored, and we so don’t need to shy away from the harm we’ve caused, we can repent of it, and move in a new direction.
Thank you for your thoughts on DEI programs. The examples you give point to two other factors that contribute to the ineffectiveness of some DEI traininigs. First, the organizational leaders who set up such programs often have not bought in to the fundamental human value of helping people come to understand those they have been socialized to see as "other." Often company leaders institute DEI with the idea of checking a box. Roosevelt Thomas longtime leader in corporate DEI programs says that it takes an organization 15 years to make the cultural changes to create a truly equitable and inclusive workplace. Most corporate leaders are not committed for the long haul.
Second, most DEI program focus on behavior rather than starting with self-reflection. If I cannot see how I have been shaped (often unconsciously) by white supremacy, why would I see a need for change? The culture and systems that shape our lives inculcate us to adopt attitudes and perspectives that stand in the way of a true embrace of diversity. For white people especially, it is difficult for them to see how they have been shaped and emotionally crippled by white supremacy, and is why DEI programs are often seen to cause guilt and fear, when in fact what they do bring to the surface those emotions that serve as a barrier to true empathy and interest in the racial other. A person must get in touch with the ways in which white supremacy/systemic racism has shaped their attitudes before they will have any interest in moving further.