It was a Friday morning, and I was more excited than usual about a client meeting. The client was a small organization, the staff young, and their work highly technical. As a diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practitioner whose father spent 40 years writing code to fly spacecraft for NASA and who started her business serving tech firms, it felt like a match made in heaven.
We’d been courting each other for months, following pressure the staff placed on leadership to instill change after the murder of George Floyd. I’d met the entire team, and this call was to finalize our work together.
Ten minutes before the meeting, I received an email from the leader saying they were discontinuing our conversations after a team member raised concerns about an article I wrote. In the piece, my Latinx co-author and I unpack the complexity of racial and cultural identity in a mixed and intersectional world. I wrote that while I’ve passed for Latinx for 30 years, I’ve only openly “identified [myself] as Latina twice — both in superficial social situations just to see if [I] could get away with it.”
The objecting team member felt this was disrespectful, and the team decided that they weren’t comfortable hiring a consultant who “justifies cultural appropriation.”
“I hope you can appreciate that we need to make our consultant choice a fully inclusive process,” said the white male leader. “And if any one person was not fully onboard with a choice, we would continue our search.”
For me, this incident sums up three aspects of what’s wrong with much DEI work that’s launched with breathless urgency over the past year: cancel culture, 100% consensus and an expectation of perfection. While I don’t regret the loss of that client, as it was clearly not a fit, I do regret that the organization chose to make decisions based on a faulty understanding of DEI, and to take actions that actually reduce inclusiveness.
The following suggestions are intended to help other organizations avoid the same pitfalls. Read the rest on TLNT.com!
