Hollywood’s DEI Programs Have Begun to D-I-E. How Hard Did the Industry Really Try?

The TV creator Justin Simien doesn’t waste any words: “It’s still quite dangerous and difficult to be Black in Hollywood.” We’re talking about how the television world vowed to change after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the protests that followed. Entertainment conglomerates promised to slay systemic racism and knit diversity, equity, and inclusion into the fabric of the industry.

We are now closing in on the fifth anniversary of those vows. So how’s that going?

“It not only didn’t change, but in some ways it kind of got worse,” says Simien, who created Dear White People and directed Haunted Mansion and the recent doc series Hollywood Black. “Because of my experience as a Black person trying to get Dear White People made, I knew not to expect much, but it’s still pretty disheartening when even the façade totally falls away. My experience was having projects that were very enthusiastically announced but never got to the green light—or somebody white would be brought on to do the rewrite.” Simien sometimes cringes now when a studio wants to put out a release about a show of his in development. “I just think, Oh, you need to announce a Black project right now! They are seen as a more diverse place to work, but then behind the scenes, it doesn’t feel like the project’s being taken seriously. It’s almost as if I’m a figurehead.”

“When times are tough, the idea of acting on high-minded beliefs becomes harder.”

Virtue signaling announcements, combined with the success of a handful of showrunners of color, may suggest that Hollywood has been working hard to resolve its race problem. “I honestly think we’re in a pretty poor place, which is really disappointing after seeing all those huge commitments,” says Kristen Marston, a cultural consultant who advises many entertainment companies and worked on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and The Little Mermaid. “George Floyd was such a big news-cycle moment that everyone wanted to jump on it…. I was getting invited to do presentations and go into writers rooms consistently, and that has dropped drastically in the last few years.”

Hollywood has struggled mightily in the post-streaming-bubble, post-strike era, with corporate consolidation and budget cuts crippling television production. The industry’s short attention span doesn’t help either. “When times are tough, the idea of acting on high-minded beliefs becomes harder,” says an industry dealmaker. Writers and crews now compete for a shrinking pool of jobs, and executive positions are regularly slashed. “Across the board, everyone has been suffering,” says Thembi Banks, a TV writer and filmmaker. “But there’s that old adage: ‘When white America has a cold, Black America has the flu.’”

Alarm bells clanged for people of color in Hollywood when a spate of high-profile DEI executives either stepped down or were caught up in budget cuts in 2023. One canary who didn’t survive the coal mine was Karen Horne, who created the blueprint for many talent-pipeline programs in the industry. Most recently, she was Warner Bros. Discovery North America’s senior vice president for DEI, before she was laid off as part of the company’s restructuring. The timing of these executives’ departures might have been partly coincidental, but the frustration they triggered was severe.

Those who were laid off and those who left of their own volition agree that most DEI setups are ineffectual. Says Horne, “The systems that are in place don’t support success.” Jeanell English, who was the executive vice president of impact and inclusion at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, resigned in June 2023. “In 2020 there was a lot of pressure for organizations to hire these roles, but not a real understanding of what the jobs were,” she says. “You’re bringing me in to really challenge, question, rebuild, dismantle the systems that your organization has been built on. And that is fundamentally uncomfortable if you’re not ready to receive and respond to that level of critique.” Fast-forward to 2023: “You have [DEI] people who are burnt out from pushing to implement things that they thought would be welcomed,” says English. “You have the [community] frustrated, because they don’t see enough change. And then you have these organizations who—how do you justify a job that maybe you didn’t even really want? So you start to see roles being cut.”

In his first term, Donald Trump banned racial sensitivity training for federal contractors. And he hailed last year’s Supreme Court ruling that declared affirmative action in higher education unconstitutional, potentially leaving workplace initiatives vulnerable to lawsuits. America First Legal Foundation—a conservative group founded by Stephen Miller, who has been named deputy chief of staff for policy in the new administration—has brought federal civil rights complaints accusing “woke corporations,” like Nike, Hershey, and United Airlines, of discriminating against white men. Among the many companies in Miller’s sights is CBS, which is being sued by a white male freelance writer who alleges that CBS’s policies favored less experienced writers of color. (CBS has argued that it has a First Amendment right to hire whomever it wants.) The group also filed a federal civil rights complaint against Disney for its inclusion standards.

“I’ve heard people being very cautious about potential lawsuits that could arise from perceived quota systems. There are even some concerns about people’s titles having ‘equity’ in them.”

Many of Hollywood’s pipeline programs—which give fledgling writers, actors, and directors experience—were designed to be loosely inclusive. That meant they could accept a straight white man along with people from underrepresented communities to insulate them from legal challenges. One television executive explains that for broader DEI programs, there’s a “reason why we use the word goal and not mandate—because you can suggest a number, but you can’t mandate it, or it could fall into the lines of reverse discrimination.”

But the Supreme Court’s anti-affirmative-action ruling still hangs over existing programs. “I’ve heard people being very cautious about potential lawsuits that could arise from perceived quota systems,” Marston says. “There are even some concerns about people’s titles having ‘equity’ in them—being scared that that’s going to be illegal or unethical at this point.” She sees entertainment companies trying to protect themselves from the “anti-woke” backlash. “That distracts from their brand, and so they’re going to do anything that they can to avoid it.”

After George Floyd’s death, the co-chairs of the Writers Guild of America West’s Committee of Black Writers wrote an open letter to Hollywood, “unapologetically demanding systemic change.” One of the three cowriters, Michelle Amor, was stunned when it went viral. “I was like, Whoa! People actually do want to hear this. And I did see people getting overall deals; I saw people getting staffed. There was this kind of renewed interest in looking for diverse voices.” But she remains cynical, mentioning that several big-name white writers have approached her about collaborating: “Their whole idea is to come in and just attach you so that they can have the diversity.”

Just before the Black Lives Matter protests and coronavirus lockdown in 2020, streamers trying to compete with Netflix threw vast sums of money at showrunners and cranked out a record number of series. The voracious need for new content paved a path for an adventurous array of shows. “There was a view that you could program to specific communities, that it was fine to find niches as long as those added subscriptions,” says the dealmaker. But once Wall Street began demanding profits, streamers felt compelled to find wider audiences for each show—and shows created by people of color were often the first to go.

“It is very hard to ignore the numbers, with the percentage of shows [canceled or not renewed] that are about marginalized populations,” says Brigitte Muñoz-Liebowitz, showrunner for Gordita Chronicles, a Latinx coming-of-age show abruptly canceled and pulled from Max in 2022. “We got great reviews, we had great ratings. It’s hard to not come to a conclusion that there was some kind of bias.” (Max has said kids and family shows won’t be part of its slate “in the immediate future,” though it hailed the team behind the show.)

When Dear White People concluded after four seasons on Netflix, Simien says, “we gained a sizable audience, but there was really no conversation after the show ended about, ‘Oh, should we have a deal with the person who made one of our first Black original shows?’ I felt that was not a good sign. Eventually they just drop all this stuff and start canceling the shows.”

Hollywood is in the midst of a flight to safety, and it often equates safety with white men. “There’s a tendency, particularly when jobs are scarce and the competition for employment is fierce, for work to go to the most experienced producers,” Producers Guild of America national executive director Susan Sprung points out. That leaves fewer gigs for people of color and others who have been denied opportunities in the past. Hence the need for pipeline programs to even the playing field.

Those programs have helped many talented people get an entry-level job, but they don’t compensate for more amorphous forms of discrimination. “The default is that showrunners are usually white,” says a TV writer who graduated from a studio diversity pipeline program and went on to develop and write for multiple series. “Showrunners hire their friends, then whatever few slots are left are usually divvied up between people that their friends already know or somebody that the network forces in there to make it a not-all-white situation.”:

“What is wild is that in a moment of great economic shift… this idea has not taken hold that inclusive storytelling could help reinvent this business.”

Among the many reasons that showrunners want to hire familiar faces for those shrinking number of slots, the TV writer believes, is that they are very intimate, anything-goes environments: “We all say crazy stuff, letting off steam, and it’s a bonding exercise. I think a lot of these white folks like to say racist stuff and not be held accountable—or really sexist or homophobic or ableist or classist stuff.” They worry that the Supreme Court’s anti-affirmative-action ruling will have a chilling effect. “These folks feel empowered to get away with this stuff now.”

It’s not as if nothing productive emerged from the racial reckoning. “Some really great things came out of that moment,” says Julie Ann Crommett, a former studio exec and the founder of the DEI organization Collective Moxie. “I have far more sophisticated conversations with people in the entertainment industry around issues of equity, of representation and storytelling, of stereotypes.” She continues, “We see some folks in leadership positions within the industry that were not there before from various different backgrounds.” That includes Universal Studio Group chairman Pearlena Igbokwe, Warner Bros. Television Group chairman and CEO Channing Dungey, and Netflix chief content officer Bela Bajaria, all extremely worthy executives who ascended to more elevated roles in 2020. Many more moved up the ladders below them. Even so, no TV executives of color show up on the highest-paid list, and few have unilateral power to greenlight shows.

Three McKinsey reports from recent years estimate that the entertainment industry forfeits $30 billion annually thanks to Hollywood’s inability or unwillingness to serve Black, Latinx, and Asian American/Pacific Islander audiences. “What is wild is that in a moment of great economic shift, contraction and change in the actual mechanisms of Hollywood content making and distribution, this idea has not taken hold that inclusive storytelling could help reinvent this business,” Crommett says. “That’s mind-boggling—that the business itself is not shifting to meet what the data is telling us.”

This failure is nudging some in Hollywood to consider forging new pathways. Even Issa Rae, who many creatives cite as a role model for Black television creators, recently talked about her frustration with the industry. “You’re seeing so many Black shows get canceled, you’re seeing so many executives—especially on the DEI side—get canned. You’re seeing very clearly now that our stories are less of a priority,” she told Net-a-Porter. “It’s made me take more steps to try to be independent down the line if I have to.” That could mean creating new studios, distributors, and streamers focused on different kinds of programming.

“A white agent told me, ‘Wow, it’s lucky to be diverse nowadays—I’m trying to get all of my white clients to be seen, but it’s just so hard right now.’”

This resonates deeply for Thembi Banks, the writer-filmmaker, who looks to Tyler Perry’s independent studio for inspiration. “People were scratching their heads looking at this man like, What is this and why would I want it? You know why you want it? Because there’s an audience out there for it! He was smart enough to go after it, and so I think there’s more of that to come from some really brilliant Black creatives.” Banks says, “Why not look towards the Kevin Harts, the Issa Raes, the Lena Waithes and say, ‘Let’s come up with our own way of distributing, creating, and marketing things’?”

Just as the movement for gender equity in Hollywood made some men feel that women threatened their jobs, the push for racial diversity has of course sparked some backlash. “A white agent told me, ‘Wow, it’s lucky to be diverse nowadays—I’m trying to get all of my white clients to be seen, but it’s just so hard right now,’” says a TV casting director.

Writer-producer Hilliard Guess laughs when he says that, despite the concern from some white industry folks, what he’s “found is that there’s still a lot of very mediocre [white] people who are successful in Hollywood. If they looked like us, they wouldn’t be in that position.”