My post titles are lacking creativity, but it’s all I seem to be able to muster these days. After a pretty long hiatus from FB debates/discussions, I find myself sucked back in during the second Trump reign. One particularly long thread recently focused on DEI. It’s clear to me now, more clear than ever, that the hatred of DEI is largely based on a total misunderstanding of what it is. This isn’t the first time that some political party has distorted a thing to make it something different than it is, and then attacked it. “Socialism,” “critical race theory,” “welfare.” All turned into something they aren’t and attacked by the right. I honestly can’t think of examples of the left doing this, but I would bet that they exist and I’m just not sharp enough to bring them to mind.

I’ve come to believe that the vast majority of people who complain about DEI have very little idea what it is. That’s frustrating. They seem to think that DEI is 100% about hiring some less qualified individual just because that person is a member of a minority group. They, reasonably, view that as reverse discrimination. I agree with them that it is, and I don’t think we should do that.

But anybody who has attended DEI training (at least good DEI training), will recognize that mischaracterization of DEI. At the core, what DEI is about is recognizing, appreciating, and welcoming diversity, equity, and inclusion. I would like to know which of the three of those things is the most offensive to somebody who hates DEI. But, again, they don’t think it’s about diversity, equity, and inclusion, they think it’s reverse discrimination. It’s not.

I think it’s helpful to consider things from the hiring perspective. Anybody who has been involved in hiring, especially before DEI trainings started, probably can recall some discussion of “fit” for an applicant. This is especially true in discussions of reasons against hiring somebody. They don’t “fit” with the “culture” of our place. It feels reasonable (at least it felt reasonable when I’ve been in rooms when I heard people say things like that). The problem is that without realizing it, when we say/feel/think things like that, we’re listening to our human need to establish in-groups and out-groups.

DEI training has helped stop that from happening. It’s not about hiring a less qualified applicant because of their race. It’s about not overlooking a qualified applicant because of their race. And the efforts seem to be working, at least a bit. More than 20 years ago, a study showed that the name used by fake applicants for jobs had an impact on the likelihood they’d get called for an interview. “Black” sounding names were less likely to get interviews, even though everything else about them was held constant. The study was repeated recently, and the numbers were a lot more equitable. Of course this wasn’t an experiment and there isn’t a controlled variable, but it seems reasonable to conclude that awareness of the problem, which is what DEI training is all about, played a role.

It’s also worth noting that special initiatives to improve minority participation in certain sectors doesn’t just benefit individuals from the minority groups, but also helps people from the majority groups. I can’t speak from experience in lots of areas, but I can speak to this from experience with NIH diversity grants and fellowships, as well as university-sponsored diversity recruitment efforts. Take this hypothetical scenario (which I can say, with certainty, has happened in real life more than once): A research lab is part of a graduate program and two prospective students apply to work in that research lab. One is a highly qualified applicant who is a member of a minority group. Let’s call this applicant “Lisa.” The other is qualified, but not as strong of an applicant, but is not a member of an underrepresented group. Let’s call that applicant “Amy.” There are special diversity lines of funding available, so the graduate program offers admission to Lisa on a diversity line and offers admission to Amy on a standard line. Neither student is unqualified, and both get into the PhD program of their dreams. Now, rewind, use a time machine to go back in time and cancel the diversity lines. End the program that provided that funding. No more special diversity lines. Lisa and Amy apply to the program, but there is only one spot now because there are no diversity lines, so Lisa is accepted and Amy is rejected. In the timeline with the DEI lines, the non-minority applicant benefited from the spot created by the diversity line.

Somebody might challenge this scenario by saying that if we didn’t have the specialized diversity line, then the money that funded that program could have gone into the main lines, so there would have been two lines in that timeline anyway and both students would have been accepted. In a perfect world, that might be true. But the world isn’t perfect, and it’s more likely that the funding for the diversity lines would have gone to some building project or alumni outreach or some other pet project of the provost.

I think the challenge we have, as supporters of these things, is to be true to what they were intended to do, and to keep pushing back at the misinformation about what they are. At least as much as we can.