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A clear-eyed reckoning with the failures of the DEI industry, and a case for how its tools can be revived to build power
Before President Trump gutted federal DEI programs, and a quarter of corporations followed suit, the diversity, equity and inclusion industry was everyone’s favorite political punching bag. The right blamed DEI for everything from plane crashes to making white people feel bad, while some on the left were all too eager to celebrate its corporate demise.
In After Diversity,writer, organizer, and former DEI consultant Kim Tran argues that while DEI was never the political horizon, at its core is an essential understanding that workplaces are strategic sites of struggle. Tran takes a hard look at the DEI industry’s fraught history, explaining why, in the decades after the civil rights movement, it failed to deliver on its lofty promises. From union-busting personnel managers to celebrity influencers, DEI has offered feelings of belonging as a distraction from politicization and to encourage company loyalty.
Yet the same features that doomed DEI are precisely what makes it useful now. In creating spaces to address political feelings like belonging, and build power along those lines, DEI’s infrastructure can be marshaled in the fight against fascism. It can reach the people who have been overlooked and dismissed, at the exact time we need them the most.
Introduction
Chapter 1: A Perpetual House of Cards
In Chapter One I lay out the major players of the modern DEI and how the industry was built to fail. It organizes the Civil Rights activists, bureaucrats, and influencers into a coherent, messy whole to illustrate the inherent faultlines of the industry.
Chapter Two: the Elephant in the Room
Chapter two outlines the relationship between DEI and union avoidance through one of its most popular tools, Employee Resource Groups.
Chapter 3: A Bridge to Everywhere
In Chapter 3 I begin the argument for DEI, explaining its stubborn popularity, uncontroversial messaging and ubiquity as potential assets to organizers and in movements.
Chapter 4: We Could Be: What Comes After a Broken Promise
In Chapter 4 I lay out the possibility of DEI and how it could be used. Making an argument for effectively marshaling political feelings and being hyper aware of its limitations, I claim that DEI can be more than a profound political disappointment.
Conclusion