00:00Three letters, D-E-I, have become a slur, a dog-wistle for woke and black.
00:06How did that happen?
00:07From America's first attempts at inclusion, to the boom of the George Floyd economy,
00:11to the bulldozing of DEI by Trump,
00:13I'm about to walk you through a turbulent and totally true history of the war over diversity, equity, and inclusion.
00:19This is Trend Lines.
00:22From my latest article, I spoke to more than 30 professionals in the DEI space
00:26in order to understand the rise of DEI
00:28and what caused it to D-I-E.
00:31Let's go over the timeline.
00:32The first big federal experiment in inclusion starts way back in 1865.
00:37Within a year of emancipation, Congress creates the Freedmen's Bureau,
00:40and suddenly education opens up to the formerly enslaved.
00:43By the early 1870s, black schools are packed,
00:46and with federal troops still stationed in the South enforcing voting rights,
00:50black political power surges.
00:52More than 600 black state legislators, 16 black members of Congress, and two U.S. senators were elected.
00:58In 1877, Reconstruction ends, and that entire political infrastructure collapses.
01:03Jim Crow and the Klan erased a decade of progress for nearly a century.
01:06By the way, this isn't going to be a video on the history of racism.
01:10I'm just making this point to show how real civil rights gains can be wiped away in an instant.
01:14Fast forward to 1948, President Truman desegregates the U.S. military ordering equality of treatment and opportunity
01:20in the armed forces no matter your race, color, religion, or national origin.
01:24So now we're shifting from don't segregate to you must actively ensure equal opportunity,
01:29which is basically DEI logic.
01:311964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act bans discrimination in employment.
01:36This is the legal backbone for modern DEI and workplaces.
01:40Then LBJ signs an executive order requiring federal contractors to not only avoid discrimination,
01:46but to take affirmative action in hiring more employees of color.
01:50This is basically the OG federal DEI policy for the private sector.
01:54In 1972, the EEOC starts enforcing affirmative action.
01:58Employers now have to show receipts to prove their tracking underrepresentation in the workforce.
02:03The University of Michigan launches one of the first campus offices of affirmative action,
02:07with many other schools like Harvard following by 1975.
02:11By 1977, companies with federal contracts build equal opportunity divisions,
02:15but the following year, the Supreme Court rules on Bakke,
02:18a white applicant who challenges UC Davis' 16-seat minority quota.
02:22The court kills racial quotas and launches the era of holistic review,
02:26where race becomes just one factor in the admissions mix.
02:29In the mid-1980s, President Reagan's playbook was to cut enforcement
02:33and kneecap the affirmative action system without formally killing it.
02:37In 1987, a game-changing labor report predicts the next generation of workers
02:41will be mostly women, immigrants, and people of color.
02:44It was called Workforce 2000.
02:46Businesses freak out. They are not ready for what's coming.
02:49And suddenly, diversity training becomes a must-have line item in HR budgets.
02:54Cue those corny training videos we were all forced to watch.
02:57In today's multicultural workplace, respecting our differences is key.
03:01So whether you're closing a deal...
03:03Throughout the 90s, consulting firms spring up,
03:06and for years, companies perform random acts of diversity.
03:09By the time the pandemic hits in March 2020, DEI felt like it was softening.
03:14Weakened by compromise and decades of lawsuits,
03:17it feels more like a box to check rather than real change.
03:20Then something happened that reignited the national dialogue around racial justice.
03:25The killing of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020.
03:29Floyd's death forced the hand of corporate America.
03:32And as leaders across tech, entertainment, finance, and advertising pledged to rectify past wrongs,
03:37all of a sudden there was a premium on black talent.
03:40Tech company Twilio launches an anti-racism initiative inspired by the philosophy in the bestseller,
03:46How To Be An Anti-Racist, which dropped the previous summer.
03:49The book gave corporate America a new vocabulary for treating racism as a set of choices, not an identity.
03:55When I spoke to Vernee Myers, Netflix's VP of inclusion strategy at the time,
04:00she described DEI as the scaffolding that made it more possible for middle-class people of color to reverse the economic disadvantages they faced.
04:08The reality is that less than 1% of all venture capital is raised by black founders.
04:13And that percentage has actually been going down over the last several years.
04:17That year, DEI became a national talking point and corporate activism went into overdrive.
04:23McKinsey consultants estimate corporate America had announced about $66 billion in commitment so far to DEI.
04:29On January 20th, 2021, newly elected President Biden revives federal DEI with an executive order,
04:36pushing every federal agency to advance racial equity and opening a door for private sector companies to follow suit.
04:42As workplace culture changed, many black employees felt a sense of empowerment in their new roles.
04:47And with new roles came a sense of authority.
04:49For a while, everything seemed like it might work out.
04:52Throughout 2021, 83% of U.S. organizations had implemented DEI initiatives.
04:58And as corporate pocketbooks opened up, it created a new industry of DEI practitioners with huge salaries.
05:05I mean, had the title chief diversity officer ever been more in vogue?
05:09This is the peak of what many began referring to as the George Floyd economy.
05:14Still, many were suspecting that this wasn't a real fix for a broken system.
05:18I mean, how do you suddenly hire 20% more black people after decades of not doing that?
05:23Consultant Darren Martin Jr. Bold Culture told me, quote,
05:26It was positive discrimination. Companies were trying to do more things more radically in too short a time.
05:32All of a sudden, there was this expectation that 100-year-old companies could somehow install a chief diversity officer and they would solve racism overnight.
05:41But the job of DEI pros wasn't to do that. Their job was to make recommendations on how to better support black employees.
05:48The most obvious way to do that is better pay and promotions. But that doesn't give corporations the headlines that they want.
05:54Almost all of the DEI leaders I spoke to from my article agreed on one point. They were set up to fail.
06:00Corporate America, it turned out, wasn't all that interested in the business of change.
06:04And before long, the tide shifted. DEI fatigue was on the rise.
06:09In November 2022, Elon Musk buys Twitter and cuts its workforce by 75%.
06:14As the backlash commenced, DEI budgets were the first ones to get slashed as soon as the economy got tight.
06:20And positions tied to DEI were on the chopping block.
06:23By the end of 2022, DEI was drifting from boom to bust. Retaliation was inevitable.
06:28In February 2023, McKinsey adds up all the racial equity commitments companies had made after George Floyd.
06:35And the total comes to a whopping $340 billion.
06:39But it wasn't money spent. A lot of it amounted to empty promises.
06:43The summer of 2023 is a watershed moment.
06:46On June 29th, the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in college admissions, insisting that race cannot be a factor at all. Period.
06:55In July, 13 Republican state attorney generals notified 100 of the largest U.S. companies that the ruling can also apply to private entities, including employers.
07:05The next month, Edward Bloom, the activist behind the Supreme Court case, sues the Fearless Fund, an Atlanta VC backing Black women entrepreneurs.
07:14A federal appeals court agreed, ruling the fund violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by offering grants only to Black women.
07:22It's crazy to see laws meant to protect Black people, now being used against them.
07:27By the end of 2023, Meta, Tesla, DoorDash, and Lyft reduced the size of their DEI teams by 50% or more.
07:34It's open season on race-conscious initiatives.
07:37Throughout the election year, DEI jobs shrink another 8% as candidate Donald Trump promises to dismantle DEI, putting further chills on corporate hiring and expansion.
07:47Then, on a cold morning inside Washington D.C.'s Capital One arena, the battle lines of the future again come into sharp focus.
07:55It was only hours into a new American regime when President Trump signs an executive order to end, quote,
08:01radical and wasteful preferencing in federal agencies.
08:04His encore was an order targeting DEI in the private sector, installing hatchet men in the DOJ and FCC, and turning DEI into his latest woke boogeyman.
08:13Trump has taken a uniquely hostile stance on issues of diversity since returning to Washington.
08:18On March 15, 2025, the Arlington National Cemetery website removes pages about Black, Hispanic, and women veterans under the administration's anti-DEI purge.
08:28A few days later, Trump issues an executive order restoring truth and sanity to American history, targeting the Smithsonian Institution museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, for promoting, quote, divisive narratives.
08:43Plus, with the help of DOJ, he's been enforcing federal job cuts, a sector where Black workers have been traditionally overrepresented, accounting for nearly 20% of the federal civilian workforce, compared to the 13% share of the U.S. population.
08:56So, no surprise, in August 2025, Black unemployment spikes to 7.5%, its highest point since the 2021 pandemic.
09:06Let me be frank, the Black middle class is being erased.
09:09Black people have long had a target on their back throughout a country's history.
09:13No other race has been as exploited, as gruesomely enslaved, or as continually disenfranchised.
09:19And yet, maybe DEI should die.
09:22I mean, all the DEI pros I spoke to agreed that the goals around DEI were never all that clear.
09:28Maybe it was a little too performative.
09:30Maybe the DEI leaders had too little control.
09:32Maybe it all went a little too far?
09:35Us versus them?
09:36I mean, sure, Trump is smashing DEI to pieces, but some folks will also argue his rage is proof of how far the movement has come.
09:44Maybe we were making progress.
09:46I guess that's what made DEI so dangerous to the people who ultimately wanted to maintain the status quo.
09:51It would have elevated not just a few people, but the fortune of many.
09:55And perhaps would have been a real start at reorganizing America's class dynamic.
10:00And that was the scary part.
10:02So where does DEI go next?
10:04Will the mission change?
10:05Is there still hope for what it can accomplish?
10:07I've been trying not to adopt such a fatalist attitude, but maybe this is just the natural end of things.
10:12And maybe this version of DEI in the workforce, the one obsessed with hollow representation and corporate theater, has to die.
10:19And maybe that's the only way to bring it back to life in a way that actually benefits people.
10:24I'm Jason Parr.
10:25Thanks for watching.
