DEI Died This Year. Maybe It Was Supposed To.

Three letters, DEI, have become a slur,

a dog whistle for woke and Black.

How did that happen?

From America's first attempts at inclusion

to the boom of the George Floyd economy

to the bulldozing of DEI by Trump,

I'm about to walk you through

a turbulent and totally true history

of the war over diversity, equity, and inclusion.

This is Trendlines.

For my latest article,

I spoke to more than 30 professionals in the DEI space

in order to understand the rise of DEI

and what caused it to D-I-E.

Let's go over the timeline.

The first big federal experiment in inclusion

starts way back in 1865.

Within a year of emancipation,

Congress creates the Freedmen's Bureau,

and suddenly education opens up to the formerly enslaved.

By the early 1870s, Black schools are packed,

and with federal troops still stationed in the South

enforcing voting rights, Black political power surges.

More than 600 Black state legislators,

16 Black members of Congress,

and two US senators were elected.

In 1877, Reconstruction ends,

and that entire political infrastructure collapses.

Jim Crow and the Klan erase a decade of progress

for nearly a century.

By the way, this isn't gonna be a video

on the history of racism.

I'm just making this point to show

how real civil rights gains can be wiped away

in an instant.

Fast forward to 1948,

President Truman desegregates the US military,

ordering equality of treatment and opportunity

in the armed forces,

no matter your race, color, religion, or national origin.

So now we're shifting from don't segregate

to must actively ensure equal opportunity,

which is basically DEI logic.

1964, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act

bans discrimination in employment.

This is the legal backbone for modern DEI in workplaces.

Then LBJ signs an executive order

requiring federal contractors

to not only avoid discrimination

but to take affirmative action

in hiring more employees of color.

This is basically the OG federal DEI policy

for the private sector.

In 1972, the EEOC starts enforcing affirmative action.

Employers now have to show receipts

to prove they're tracking underrepresentation

in the workforce.

The University of Michigan launches

one of the first campus offices of affirmative action,

with many other schools like Harvard following by 1975.

By 1977, Companies with federal contracts

build equal opportunity divisions.

But the following year,

the Supreme Court rules on Bakke,

a white applicant who challenges

UC Davis's 16-seat minority quota.

The court kills racial quotas

and launches the era of holistic review,

where race becomes just one factor in the admissions mix.

In the mid-1980s, President Reagan's playbook

was to cut enforcement

and kneecap the affirmative action system

without formally killing it.

In 1987, a game-changing labor report

predicts the next generation of workers

will be mostly women, immigrants, and people of color.

It was called Workforce 2000.

Businesses freak out.

They are not ready for what's coming,

and suddenly diversity training becomes

a must-have line item in HR budgets.

Cue those corny training videos we were all forced to watch.

[Announcer] In today's multicultural workplace,

respecting our differences is key.

So whether you're closing a deal...

Throughout the nineties, consulting firms spring up,

and for years, companies performed random acts of diversity.

By the time the pandemic hits in March 2020,

DEI felt like it was softening.

Weakened by compromise and decades of lawsuits,

it feels more like a box to check rather than real change.

Then something happened that reignited

the national dialogue around racial justice:

the killing of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020.

Floyd's death forced the hand of corporate America,

and as leaders across tech, entertainment, finance,

and advertising pledge to rectify past wrongs,

all of a sudden there was a premium on Black talent.

Tech company Twilio launches an anti-racism initiative

inspired by the philosophy and the bestseller,

How to Be an Antiracist,

which dropped the previous summer.

The book gave corporate America a new vocabulary

for treating racism as a set of choices, not an identity.

When I spoke to Verna Myers,

Netflix's VP of Inclusion Strategy at the time,

she described DEI as the scaffolding

that made it more possible for middle-class people of color

to reverse the economic disadvantages they face.

The reality is that less than 1% of all venture capital

is raised by Black founders,

and that percentage has actually been going down

over the last several years.

That year, DEI became a national talking point,

and corporate activism went into overdrive.

McKinsey consultants estimate corporate America

had announced about 66 billion in commitments

so far to DEI.

On January 20th, 2021,

newly elected President Biden revives federal DEI

with an executive order

pushing every federal agency to advance racial equity

and opening a door for private sector companies

to follow suit.

As workplace culture changed,

many Black employees felt a sense of empowerment

in their new roles,

and with new roles came a sense of authority.

For a while, everything seemed like it might work out.

Throughout 2021,

83% of US organizations had implemented DEI initiatives,

and as corporate pocketbooks opened up,

it created a new industry of DEI practitioners

with huge salaries.

I mean, had the title Chief Diversity Officer

ever been more in vogue?

This is the peak of what many began referring to

as the George Floyd economy.

Still, many were suspecting

that this wasn't a real fix for a broken system.

I mean, how do you suddenly hire 20% more Black people

after decades of not doing that?

Consultant Darren Martin Jr. of Bold Culture told me,

quote, It was positive discrimination.

Companies were trying to do more things

more radically in too short a time.

All 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.

But the job of DEI pros wasn't to do that.

Their job was to make recommendations

on how to better support Black employees.

The most obvious way to do that

is better pay and promotions,

but that doesn't give corporations

the headlines that they want.

Almost all of the DEI leaders I spoke to for my article

agreed on one point:

they were set up to fail.

Corporate America, it turned out,

wasn't all that interested in the business of change.

And before long, the tide shifted.

DEI fatigue was on the rise.

In November 2022,

Elon Musk buys Twitter and cuts workforce by 75%.

As the backlash commenced,

DEI budgets were the first ones to get slashed

as soon as the economy got tight,

and positions tied to DEI were on the chopping block.

By the end of 2022, DEI was drifting from boom to bust.

Retaliation was inevitable.

In February 2023,

McKinsey adds up all the racial equity commitments

companies had made after George Floyd,

and the total comes to a whopping $340 billion,

but it wasn't money spent.

A lot of it amounted to empty promises.

The summer of 2023 is a watershed moment.

On June 29th, the Supreme Court strikes down

affirmative action in college admissions,

insisting that race cannot be a factor at all.

Period.

In July, 13 Republican state attorneys general

notified 100 of the largest US companies

that the ruling can also apply to private entities,

including employers.

The next month, Edward Blum,

the activist behind the Supreme Court case,

sues the Fearless Fund,

an Atlanta VC backing Black women entrepreneurs.

A federal appeals court agreed,

ruling the fund violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866

by offering grants only to Black women.

It's crazy to see laws meant to protect Black people

now being used against them.

By the end of 2023, Meta, Tesla, DoorDash, and Lyft

reduced the size of their DEI teams by 50% or more.

It's open season on race-conscious initiatives.

Throughout the election year,

DEI jobs shrink another 8%

as candidate Donald Trump promises to dismantle DEI,

putting further chills on corporate hiring and expansion.

Then on a cold morning

inside of Washington DC's Capital One Arena,

the battle lines of the future

again come into sharp focus.

It was only hours into a new American regime

when President Trump signs an executive order

to end the, quote,

radical and wasteful preferencing in federal agencies.

His 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.

Trump has taken a uniquely hostile stance

on issues of diversity since returning to Washington.

On March 15th, 2025,

the Arlington National Cemetery website removes pages

about Black, Hispanic, and women veterans

under the administration's anti-DEI purge.

A 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.

Plus, with the help of DOGE,

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 their 13% share of the US population.

So no surprise, in August 2025,

Black unemployment spikes to 7.5%,

its highest point since the 2021 pandemic.

Let me be frank: the Black middle class is being erased.

Black people have long had a target on their back

throughout our country's history.

No other race has been as exploited,

as gruesomely enslaved, or as continually disenfranchised.

And yet maybe DEI should die.

I mean, all the DEI pros I spoke to agreed

that the goals around DEI were never all that clear.

Maybe it was a little too performative.

Maybe the DEI leaders had too little control.

Maybe it all went a little too far, us versus them.

I 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.

Maybe we were making progress.

I guess that's what made DEI so dangerous

to the people who ultimately wanted

to maintain the status quo.

It would've elevated not just a few people,

but the fortune of many,

and perhaps would've been a real start

at reorganizing America's class dynamic.

And that was the scary part.

So where does DEI go next?

Will the mission change?

Is there still hope for what it can accomplish?

I've been trying not to adopt such a fatalist attitude,

but maybe this is just the natural end of things,

and maybe this version of DEI in the workforce,

the one obsessed with hollow representation

and corporate theater, has to die.

And maybe that's the only way to bring it back to life

in a way that actually benefits people.

I'm Jason Parham.

Thanks for watching.

[intriguing music]