Was I a DEI hire?
It’s a question that I sometimes toss out in the company of friends who—like me, and maybe like you—have a complicated relationship to their job. I’ve worked at WIRED as a writer for eight years, and with much success. Eight years is also an eternity in news media, and especially if you are Black. All industries suffer from unique growing pains. Ours just so happens to have laughably high turnover rates, a distaste for racial and gender diversity, and the dubious distinction of being perpetually on the verge of extinction. So on nights when friends and I gather, trading war stories of workplace microaggressions and corporate mismanagement under damp bar lighting, we wonder how we’ve lasted as long as we have.
The only reason I’ve survived, I joke, is because I’m Black.
It’s a silly thing to say, particularly because I have no actual proof of it other than the occasional feeling. What I do know is that I’ve been The Only One in more spaces than I care to remember, and rarely by choice. Journalism is painfully white the higher you climb. Most would consider being the only current Black writer on staff, and one of only a handful in its 30-year history, a failure of the company—and it is—but, really, it’s common practice across the industry. For a publication that covers the future, and often critically, we sometimes fail to reflect it.
You shape the position, but the position also shapes you. You become the voice, are shoehorned into the race beat, assigned stories to write about the killing of yet another Black person gone too soon. You retrace their last breaths in Minneapolis, in Georgia, in New York, in Every City, USA. You’re asked to make your stories more “poetic,” to report on the pain of your people, to find meaning in a moment that adds up to the same grim algebra every time: Black life is at best conditional in America. And for a very long time, though probably a little too long, I was OK with the gig because there wasn’t anyone else at the publication who was going to do it.
And those were, arguably, the good times. Today, race can feel like a job-market albatross in a way it hasn’t in a generation or two, as diversity initiatives are being bulldozed and the federal government, steered by MAGA apologists, has reframed DEI into a slur, often against Black people. “That became the problem—and the ignorance,” says Kai Lawson, an executive and former DEI lead at Dentsu Creative. I’m trying not to take it personally, but it’s the end of 2025, and that’s how it feels. Like there’s a target on my back.
But is this just my story? Of course not. My original plan for this piece was to write an oral history of DEI, to chart its rise, fall, and future. How would it survive under President Trump and beyond? Would it survive at all? But the more people I talked to—eventually totaling 32 professionals and leaders in the “DEI space”—the more the cacophony of voices devolved into something less linear and literal than I knew what to do with. So instead, I’m going to just tell you why DEI was never going to succeed.
DEI means a lot of things to different people; the phrase “diversity and equity” was coined in the 1980s by the (white) leadership coach Lewis Brown Griggs. It was, of course, a rebrand of an old idea, but whatever you call it—preferential hiring, affirmative action—its goal has always been roughly the same: to level paths of advancement. Women, veterans, queer people: Many have benefited. Today, though, what is actually meant when we talk about DEI is, I would argue, specifically Black people.
The pivotal year was 2020. At that point, Black men accounted for about 3 percent of management roles—with women of color being one of the least visible groups in senior leadership—and DEI efforts were on a “downward trend,” says Melinda Epler, a strategist and cofounder of the Tech Inclusion Conference. The pandemic didn’t help things. But the killing of George Floyd, in May of that year, reignited a national dialog around racial justice. Conversation expanded beyond the usual constituencies, and there seemed to be, at least for the moment, a unified belief that racism was not simply a matter of individual-level bias but an institutional feature of American society that was (again) in need of a reckoning.
“My job was not to cure racism.”
Floyd’s death forced the hand of corporate America, and as leaders in tech, entertainment, finance, advertising, and all across the private sector pledged to rectify past wrongs, all of a sudden there was, as Lawson puts it, “a premium on Black talent.” Companies had historically performed “random acts of diversity,” says Karen Horne, former senior vice president of North America DEI at Warner Bros. Media, but as DEI work took off and became more formalized within organizations, practitioners worked to crystallize it into meaningful gains. “Before that, we had been treating racism as a theoretical exercise,” says Latasha Gillespie, former global head of DEIA at Amazon Studios and Prime Video.
In 2021, Big Tech pledged to increase Black and Latino senior leadership, joining 83 percent of US organizations that “took action” on DEI that year. Multimillion-dollar investments to various social and racial justice organizations were announced. And as corporate pocketbooks opened up, it created a new industry of DEI practitioners—had the title chief diversity officer ever been more in vogue?—with huge salaries. There was an infusion of $340 billion into racial equity, according to one estimate from the consulting firm McKinsey. It ushered in what many began referring to as The George Floyd Economy. PayPal opened a $500 million fund to support Black and minority businesses. Netflix committed about $100 million to financial institutions supporting Black communities. Meta poured $25 million into launching We the Culture, its first Black creator incubator. “One thing that Silicon Valley understands is data,” says Ashley Mosley, a former account executive at Twitter and colead of the employee resource group Blackbirds. “And once they started to understand that more, for some people it clicked.”
President Biden signed two executive orders with the ultimate goal of bolstering diversity efforts within the federal government, opening a door for other companies to follow suit. As workplace culture changed, many Black employees felt a sense of empowerment in their new roles. I certainly did. Those were heavy, and heady, days. I wrote some of my biggest pieces; one of them was eventually made into a documentary for Hulu. For a while, everything seemed like it might work out. “It was the peak of the bell curve,” says Karen Driscoll, a consultant at Raben.
Lybra Clemons was the chief diversity, inclusion, and belonging officer at Twilio at the time. By September 2020, the company announced a commitment to being “anti-racist,” a philosophy that was gaining momentum following the 2019 publication of Ibram X Kendi’s book How to Be an Anti-Racist. “This was a company that built itself on being very open and progressive,” she says. “And the CEO was committed to that vision. And there were other CEOs who were as well. In retrospect, I don’t think anyone really knew how impossible it was.”
Vernā Myers has worked as a diversity consultant for more than 30 years. In 2018, she became Netflix’s first vice president of inclusion strategy. She had always understood DEI, in part, as “the scaffolding that made it more possible” for middle-class people of color to reverse the economic disadvantages they faced. But even in the early days, as anti-Black racism became a national talking point, and conversations that had been put on ice—ones around biased hiring practices, pay equity, and fair organizational frameworks—were suddenly trendy again, she was apprehensive. “You’ve got this horribly devastating event, and you’re thinking, ‘Is this what it took?’” Myers says.
Corporate America, it turned out, wasn’t all that interested in the business of change. “What are the practices that allow you to hire 20 percent more Black people that quickly if you weren’t doing that before? It was positive discrimination,” says Darren Martin Jr., CEO of the consultancy Bold Culture. Many knew that the gains were not a genuine corrective to a broken system, that DEI was branded as a cultural problem when, in actuality, it’s an economic one. It’s only ever been about class, about America deciding who gets to have what and how much. “There was this expectation that you, a 75-year-old company, could somehow install this person and they would resolve all of your cultural ills in a matter of two years,” says Jarvis Sam, a consultant and the former chief DEI officer at Nike.
“I brought it to the head of HR and they said, ‘None of this seems like it’s going to give us a headline. I need something that’ll help get us a headline.’”
More than anything, the work took a mental toll. “It was exhausting,” Myers says, and I know the feeling. I remember an assignment where I had to watch, and rewatch, and make sense of, a clip of Ahmaud Arbery’s murder, stitching together what meaning I could. The work felt charged, powerful—but, as Myers says, “it comes at a cost.” There’s a moment that still haunts her from this time. “A colleague said to me, ‘It’s like they’re nursing at our tits again.’ Every leader was calling you, ‘What do I say? What do I say? What do I say?’ And little by little, you were giving them the milk and nurturing them.”
Lawson put it another way: “My job was not to cure racism.” Not long after Floyd was killed, the company she was working at tasked her with finding recommendations on how to better support Black employees. “We came up with the real ideas—better pay and promotions. I brought it to the head of HR and they said, ‘None of this seems like it’s going to give us a headline. I need something that’ll help get us a headline.’” That’s when she realized what was actually going on. “The corporate function of DEI is not to actually make things better—it is to pacify.”
What many were realizing was that corporate activism (if such a thing exists) had a ceiling. It was a reaction, not a behavior change. “It was a microwave approach,” Martin says. Judy Jackson, then the global head of culture at WPP, remembers when the tide shifted. More and more employees were getting tired of the topic, and leaders were exhausted by it. DEI fatigue was on the rise. “It was, ‘Can we talk about something else?’” Jackson says. DEI “can sort of encourage a sense of us versus them, which is not its intent. People would say things like, ‘Well, I want to start a white ERG.’”
By the end of 2022, as DEI went from boom to bust, a “blatant regression” set in. “Someone on LinkedIn told me we were contributing to America’s race problem,” Sam says. DEI budgets were the first ones to get slashed as soon as the economy got tight, and several companies followed suit, terminating positions tied to DEI. When I asked a DEI executive about that period, and what stood out, and maybe how it all read as corporate theater because nothing really improved, she didn’t sugarcoat her response. “This is corporate America—what are you expecting?” she says. “It’s as good as it was ever going to get.”
On a cold January morning inside Washington, DC’s Capital One Arena, the battle lines of the future came into sharp focus. After a rally onstage where President Trump rescinded 78 executive orders and memos from the previous administration, he signed a new one to end “radical and wasteful” preferencing in federal agencies. He followed that with another order aimed squarely at DEI programs in the private sector, appointing lieutenants—in the Justice Department and the Federal Communications Commission—who would later call for inquiries into companies that uphold DEI standards.
Trump has taken a uniquely hostile stance on issues of diversity. His administration has scrubbed Black historical figures from national websites. Scrutinized the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Enforced federal job cuts, a sector where Black workers have been traditionally overrepresented. And all of it has been undertaken by a federal government that seems to challenge the legitimacy of Black life. “Why would we expect the Ku Klux Klan not to burn a cross?” says a former engineer at Twitter and Google. “That’s what they do. He [Trump] is a racist, and he’s pandering to racist people.” This summer, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Black unemployment surged the highest it’s been since 2021.
In America, one can never escape the inevitability of race. It’s happening right now, as you read this—that very inevitability, the one built on old power imbalances and a racial hierarchy, is pushing industries to the brink.
The fact of it is not exactly groundbreaking. Black people have long faced systemic—often impossible—barriers throughout our country’s history: No other race has been as exploited, as gruesomely enslaved, or as continuously disenfranchised. Progress was made in spite of those barriers, but empowerment comes at a high price. There’s a fine print that’s meant to serve as a reminder: You’re only allowed to go so far, achieve so much. In theory, that’s what made DEI so dangerous to the people who ultimately wanted to maintain the status quo. It would have elevated not just a few people but the fortunes of many—and perhaps would have been a real, if marginal, start at reorganizing America’s class dynamic. “Some of us got great big jobs with these great big bonuses and brought these great big homes and created these great big lifestyles,” Lawson says. But when you are Black and successful, when you attempt to reach for more, more than you were told you could have, it is only a matter of time before the fangs of antagonism, hate, and history reveal their intent. “Every time there’s been an advance, a call for a reckoning, a sense in which more fundamental transformative possibilities are on the table, there has come after that a backlash,” says legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. “The crux of anti-Black racism is the idea of our deficit.”
In the summer of 2023, the Supreme Court essentially rejected affirmative action in college admissions, insisting that race cannot be a primary factor. “It was America being America,” tech engineer Leslie Miley says of the decision. “Stevie Wonder could’ve seen that coming.” The ruling gave the case against DEI new legs as more legal attacks were mounted. Thirteen Republican state attorneys general notified 100 of the largest US companies that July, arguing that the court ruling can also apply to private entities, including employers.
The following month, anti-affirmative-action activist Edward Blum, who helped orchestrate the affirmative action cases, put that theory to the test when a group he leads filed a lawsuit against the Fearless Fund, an Atlanta-based VC for women of color entrepreneurs. Though the parties settled, he basically won. The case was “a big tipping point,” Epler suggests, because it was exploiting anti-discrimination laws that were put in place to help, not hurt, Black women. By the end of 2023, several corporations had reduced the size of their DEI teams by 50 percent or more, including Meta, Tesla, DoorDash, and Lyft.
“The minute you try to make a capitalistic organization become a social justice organization, that’s when you are going to fail.”
People panicked. One Black tech worker in San Francisco, who asked that their name not be printed, took dramatic action. “I knew what was coming,” they tell me. “Anything that had to do with DEI, the election, or voting, I deleted. I deleted a bunch of tweets. I redid my bio, unlisted Medium articles, removed previous job posts from LinkedIn. I don’t want to be seen as a DEI hire or connected to people who talk about it. We’re in the first year of a new administration, and we have a long road ahead of us. Put your own oxygen mask on first. Take care of yourself.” (In the course of finishing this story, no fewer than three people—who had originally been on the record when I talked to them earlier in the year—asked to be made anonymous. “The climate is not the same today as it was in March,” one tech exec said. “I would not say those things today due to the pattern of retribution.”)
Some suspect things will get even worse. And for many people I know—family members, friends—it already has. “I don’t even think we’re at the tip yet,” Mosley says. “A lot of really terrible things are going to happen as people try to reset the country. People have a right to feel panicked.” This spring, more than 300,000 Black women reported being purged from the US workforce, and according to a November federal jobs report, Black unemployment is nearly double the overall unemployment rate. When I said it’s hard not to take it personally, I meant it. I hold onto the fiction of my status as The Only One, though it might not matter: The Black middle class is being erased.
But maybe DEI was always going to die.
Another point almost everyone I spoke to agreed on was that the goals around DEI weren’t completely clear. There were not shared plans or priorities among DEI practitioners internally, or holistically. “There were some gaps in the collective narrative,” says Rachel Williams, a former head of DEI at Google X. Or as Jackson puts it, “No one had the playbook.” That certain grifters were being appointed figureheads only hurt the cause more. Beyond that, no matter how many people you hire or benchmarks you outline, a company has to want to change. McKinsey’s research never argued that if you simply put a person of color into a role that you will somehow see an impact to your bottom line. “The minute you try to make a capitalistic organization become a social justice organization, that’s when you are going to fail,” Gillespie says.
Driscoll adds this point: “The fact that we use the acronym is also problematic and was to our detriment,” because it automatically makes people think of “quotas over the qualifications.” Indeed, what the new age of DEI amounted to was a mild reshuffling of the Black professional class.
At the same time, “governments don’t backlash against things that aren’t working,” Sam says. “They let it die on the vine. What that implies is that we did make progress.” I keep thinking back to Myers’ point, about how DEI has been a scaffolding for so many people and how, for the foreseeable future, that scaffolding will be virtually nonexistent. Just because DEI was mishandled doesn’t mean it was worthless.
I ended every interview for this story with the same question: Where does DEI go from here? I wanted to understand how—if—it could be reimagined. Will the mission change? Is there still hope for what it can accomplish? Can the hollow, opportunistic version be replaced by something more honest, more meaningful? Over the phone from Washington, DC, Driscoll offers a sobering take: “Hope is not the first emotion that comes up for me during this time,” she says. “It’s something that I have to be intentional about reaching for.”
It’s not easy. During the course of reporting this story, there were layoffs at Teen Vogue, WIRED’s sister publication under parent company Condé Nast; according to its union, most of the employees that were let go identified as women of color or transgender, including the only two Black women working full-time on the editorial team. (A Condé Nast spokesperson told WIRED, “While many companies have rolled back their diversity, equity, and inclusion functions, Condé Nast continues to maintain a dedicated D+I team and publishes an annual D+I report.”) NBC News gutted its diversity teams, and CBS News eliminated its race and culture editorial teams. BET likewise thinned its ranks ahead of the Paramount-Skydance merger. “Has the Media Reached the End of Its DEI Era?” one headline read in November. If the social cost of having an all-white workplace no longer matters, where does the dispossession end? You’ll forgive me for wondering if I am working on borrowed time.
But just as the inevitability of race is inescapable, so too is the fact that the US is only becoming more diverse. “You can go ahead and play to one faction of our demographics in this country that is slowly losing buying power if you want to, but you are then planning for your company’s demise,” Williams says.
What I can say now, with total certainty, is that everything feels even more precarious than I let on. My personal endeavors. My professional life. My finances. My future. What’s going to happen now? It’s my job to accurately distill the front lines of history, to make sure the dominant narrative—the one fed through warped X feeds and TikTok clips and injected with cheap symbolism on cable news—doesn’t misrepresent what actually happened, what’s actually happening. To paraphrase sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom, I’ve made a career writing about identity and race because for a very long time it was the only way Black writers could actually claim legitimacy in a public discourse that defines itself, in part, by how well it excludes Black people.
That’s what I do. So here I am again, doing the thing I do, the thing that feels at once hard, contradictory, necessary, not my responsibility, and possibly beside the point. It’s taken me the better part of the year to get here, to admit to some pretty uncomfortable things I won’t be able to take back. I’ve been reluctant to write the part of the story that involves me. But how could I not? The uneasy and inconvenient truth is that I am also part of it. There’s no way they’re going to fire the only Black writer on staff, I have reasoned on too many occasions to count. But that’s a lie. It’s also no way to live.
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