The diversity, equity, and inclusion industry exploded in 2020 and 2021, but it is undergoing a reckoning of late, and not just in states controlled by Republicans, where officials are dismantling DEI bureaucracies in public institutions. Corporations are cutting back on DEI spending and personnel. News outlets such as The New York Times and New York magazine are publishing more articles that cover the industry with skepticism. And DEI practitioners themselves are raising concerns about how their competitors operate.

The scrutiny is overdue. This growing multibillion-dollar industry was embedded into so many powerful public and private institutions so quickly that due diligence was skipped and costly failures guaranteed.

Now and forever, employers should advertise jobs to applicants of all races and ethnicities, afford everyone an equal opportunity to be hired and promoted, manage workplaces free of discrimination, and foster company cultures where everyone is treated with dignity. America should conserve any gains it has made in recent years toward an equal-opportunity economy. Perhaps the best of the DEI industry spurred the country in that direction.

However, the worst of the DEI industry is expensive and runs from useless to counterproductive. And even people who highly value diversity and inclusion should feel queasy about the DEI gold rush that began in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. A poor Black man’s death became a pretext to sell hazily defined consulting services to corporations, as if billions in outlays, mostly among relatively privileged corporate workers, was an apt and equitable response. A radical course correction is warranted––but first, let’s reflect on how we got here.

On rare occasions, a depraved act captures the attention of a nation so completely that there is a widespread impulse to vow “never again” and to act in the hope of making good on that promise. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination prompted the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1968. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, triggered a global war against al-Qaeda, among many other things, including the tenuously connected invasion and occupation of Iraq.

[Conor Friedersdorf: “They learn to parrot what they know they’re supposed to say” ]

Floyd’s murder was similarly galvanizing. Arresting, trying, and convicting the police officers involved, and implementing new police training, was the most immediate response. But Floyd’s story suggested some additional possibilities. With several criminal convictions in his past, Floyd tried to turn his life around, preaching nonviolence in a neighborhood plagued by gun crime, serving as a mentor to young people, and trying to stay employed. He also struggled with drug addiction, layoffs due to circumstances beyond his control, and money problems that presumably played a role in the counterfeit bill he was trying to pass on the day that he was killed. If a callous police officer was the primary cause of his death, secondary causes were as complex and varied as poverty in America.

So how strange––how obscene, in fact––that America’s professional class largely reacted to Floyd’s murder not by lavishing so much of the resources spent in his name on helping poor people, or the formerly (or currently) incarcerated, or people with addictions, or the descendants of slaves and sharecroppers, or children of single mothers, or graduates of underfunded high schools, but rather by hiring DEI consultants to gather employees together for trainings.  

In what, exactly?

It is often hard to say. What has one been trained to do after hearing Robin DiAngelo, the best-selling author and social-justice educator, lecture on what she calls “white fragility,” or after pondering a slide deck with cartoons meant to illustrate the difference between equality and equity as critical theorists understand it?

Illustration by The Atlantic. Sources: Getty / Interaction Institute for Social Change

Or after absorbing the racial-equity consultant Tema Okun’s widely circulated claims that attributes including “sense of urgency” and beliefs including “individualism” are traits of “white supremacy culture”? (Okun made these claims in a 1999 article that even she regards as widely misused. She once told an interviewer about the article, “It was not researched. I didn’t sit down and deliberate. It just came through me.” She has launched a website that explains her views in far more detail and with more nuance.)

Consider a specific PR pitch from a DEI consultant in 2021, chosen for how typical it is. It leads by invoking Floyd’s death as the impetus to “take bolder actions.” It promises expertise in “best practices” to corporate leaders. Then it pivots to naming a specific training on offer, “Microaggressions in the Workplace,” which, along with other offerings, will help “create a culture where employees feel valued and are encouraged to be their true selves, celebrating each individual’s uniqueness.” The pitch claims that this training “enables talent acquisition, retention, and career advancement.” Is it not inappropriate to use an unemployed Black man’s murder by police to justify expenditures on reducing unintentional micro-slights at work so the bosses can retain more talent?

[Conor Friedersdorf: Can Chloé Valdary sell skeptics on DEI?]

Of course, setting aside unseemly invocations of Floyd’s name, an initiative needn’t be a coherent response to his death to be defensible or worthwhile. All companies should invest in being equal-opportunity employers, including affirmative steps to ensure, for example, that managers haven’t unwittingly introduced unjust pay disparities or culturally biased dress codes. Beyond that, if DEI consultants made life better for marginalized groups or people of color or any other identifiable cohort within a given corporation or organization, or boosted corporate profits so that their fees paid for themselves, the industry could be justified on different terms.

But most DEI consulting fails those tests.

Harvard Business Review published an article in 2012 called “Diversity Training Doesn’t Work,” which drew heavily on research published in 2007 by  the sociologists Frank Dobbin, Alexandra Kalev, and Erin Kelly. “A study of 829 companies over 31 years showed that diversity training had ‘no positive effects in the average workplace,’” the article reported. “Millions of dollars a year were spent on the training resulting in, well, nothing.” In 2018, Dobbin and Kalev wrote that “hundreds of studies dating back to the 1930s suggest that antibias training does not reduce bias, alter behavior or change the workplace.”

Portending the 2020 explosion of DEI, they continued, “We have been speaking to employers about this research for more than a decade, with the message that diversity training is likely the most expensive, and least effective, diversity program around. But they persist, worried about the optics of getting rid of training, concerned about litigation, unwilling to take more difficult but consequential steps or simply in the thrall of glossy training materials and their purveyors.”

And no wonder that DEI consultants struggle to be effective: In a 2021 article in the Annual Review of Psychology, a team of scholars concluded that the underlying research on how to intervene to reduce prejudice is itself flawed and underwhelming while regularly oversold.

A paper published in the 2022 Annual Review of Psychology concluded, “In examining hundreds of articles on the topic, we discovered that the literature is amorphous and complex and does not allow us to reach decisive conclusions regarding best practices in diversity training.” The authors continued, “We suggest that the enthusiasm for, and monetary investment in, diversity training has outpaced the available evidence that such programs are effective in achieving their goals.”

Those outside the industry are hardly alone in levying harsh critiques. Many industry insiders are scathing as well. Last year in Harvard Business Review, Lily Zheng, a diversity, equity, and inclusion strategist, consultant, and speaker, posited that the DEI industrial complex has a “big, poorly kept secret”: “The actual efficacy” of most trainings and interventions is “lower than many practitioners make it out to be.” In Zheng’s telling, the industry’s problems flow in large part from “the extreme lack of standards, consistency, and accountability among DEI practitioners.”

Zheng was even more blunt in comments to New York in 2021:

When your clients are these companies that are desperate to do anything and don’t quite understand how this works, ineffective DEI work can be lucrative. And we’re seeing cynicism pop up as a result, that DEI is just a shitty way in which companies burn money.

And I’m like, Yeah, it can be.

What if instead of burning the money, we simply redirected it to the poor?

Yes, I understand that it isn’t as if that money would have gone to the neediest among us but for the DEI initiatives of the past few years. Still, I am being serious when I propose that alternative. (I should note that The Atlantic, like many media companies, holds DEI trainings for new hires. These trainings include discussions of Okun’s critique of “sense of urgency” and an updated version of the equity/equality cartoon.)

[Conor Friedersdorf: Professors need the power to fire diversity bureaucrats]

The DEI spending of 2020 and 2021 was a signal sent from executives to workers that the bosses are good people who value DEI, a signal executives sent because many workers valued it. Put another way, the outlays were symbolic. At best, they symbolized something like “We care and we’re willing to spend money to prove it.” But don’t results matter more than intention?

A more jaded appraisal is that many kinds of DEI spending symbolize not a real commitment to diversity or inclusion, let alone equity, but rather the instinctive talent that college-educated Americans have for directing resources to our class in ways that make us feel good.

In that telling, the DEI-consulting industry is social-justice progressivism’s analogue to trickle-down economics: Unrigorous trainings are held, mostly for college graduates with full-time jobs and health insurance, as if by changing us, the marginalized will somehow benefit. But in fact, the poor, or the marginalized, or people of color, or descendants of slaves, would benefit far more from a fraction of the DEI industry’s profits.  

It would be too sweeping to say that no DEI consultant should ever get hired. Underneath that jargony umbrella is a subset of valuable professionals who have expertise in things like improving hiring procedures, boosting retention, resolving conflict, facilitating hard conversations after a lawsuit, processing a traumatic event, or assessing and fixing an actually discriminatory workplace. In a given circumstance, a company might need one or more of those skills. Ideally, larger organizations develop human-resources teams with all of those skills.

But the reflexive hiring of DEI consultants with dubious expertise and hazy methods is like setting money on fire in a nation where too many people are struggling just to get by. The professional class should feel good about having done something for social justice not after conducting or attending a DEI session, but after giving money to poor people. And to any CEO eager to show social-justice-minded employees that he or she cares, I urge this: Before hiring a DEI consultant, calculate the cost and let workers vote on whether the money should go to the DEI consultant or be given to the poor. Presented with that choice, I bet most workers would make the equitable decision.

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Russia is stepping up its campaign to terrorize Kyiv. But the Russians, for all their bluster, are now on the defensive and likely to stay there—if Ukraine gets the weapons it needs from the West.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The first year of AI college ends in ruin. Elon Musk among the anti-Semites Why Joe Biden caved What Ukraine Needs

The world, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is awaiting the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia’s occupying armies. Ukraine has survived a brutal winter and the destruction of yet another city, Bakhmut. But don’t expect the renewed Ukrainian push to be signaled with a whistle and a charge from the trenches; this isn’t World War I, even if the Russian commanders are fighting (and sacrificing their men) as if it’s 1914.

Indeed, the first moves of Ukraine’s counteroffensive operations are apparently already under way. Ukrainian forces have launched several counterattacks around Bakhmut in the past week, reclaiming territory from the Russians, who controlled most of the city (or what’s left of it). As The Wall Street Journal reported, the Ukrainians created a “Bakhmut trap” for Moscow; the Russians stupidly allowed themselves to be bled in inconclusive but brutal engagements, and now Ukraine is recapturing positions in days that Russia took many weeks to gain.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his high command know that their forces are in a tight spot, and so they’ve tried to fall back on their usual tactic of striking at civilians to try to break Ukrainian will. But even Russia’s attempt to attack a major city last night went haywire: The Ukrainians claim that the Russians fired 18 missiles at Kyiv, including Putin’s prized Kinzhals, and all 18 were shot down by Ukrainian air defenses. So far, this claim is unverified (and of course, the Russians churlishly disputed it).

The Ukrainian counteroffensive will pick up speed and intensity in the coming weeks, but the Russians had already been incurring immense casualties. The Wagner mercenaries, a private hypernationalist Russian army run by a wealthy warlord named Yevgeny Prigozhin, has suffered especially high losses. Prigozhin recently released a video in which he stood before a group of corpses and unleashed a barrage of curses—few people in the world can swear like the Russians—against the Russian government for starving Wagner’s forces of supplies.

(I do not know what to make of a report that Prigozhin was trying to cut a deal with the Ukrainians to sell out Russian military positions to save his men in Bakhmut. The story could be a clever psychological operation by Kyiv, and Prigozhin denies it, but he’s so awful—and he hates the Russian Defense Ministry so much for shorting his men on bullets—that it’s plausible. You can bet that Putin’s officials are pretty interested to know the truth and are working to find it.)

It’s time to make Prigozhin, Putin, and everyone else in the Kremlin start swearing even more. The Ukrainians have been asking for jets, longer-range systems, and more artillery. The United States has sent Patriot air-defense systems, the United Kingdom has provided the Storm Shadow missile system, and Germany has shipped more Leopard tanks. But it’s not enough. The Ukrainians are burning through ammunition at a high rate, and they still need help stopping Russia’s missile attacks. The West can do more to ensure that the Ukrainian counteroffensive succeeds.

Regular readers know that this is something of a shift in my thinking. Early on in this conflict, I advocated for a firm but cautious policy. I wanted the U.S. and NATO to provide weapons, money, and support, but I did not want free-world nations, in those first months, to provide systems that the Russians could use to claim direct Western involvement in the conflict. (I was especially opposed—and remain so—to irresponsible calls for NATO to patrol Ukraine’s skies.)

Both the military and the political situations, however, have changed significantly since the winter of 2022. First, at this point there is no way for Russia to lie about Western involvement, either to its own people or to anyone else in the world. The early fog of war has lifted, and there is no doubt about who is fighting whom in Europe.

Second, any hope that the Russians could be encouraged to show restraint evaporated months ago. At the outset, we might have expected that Russian failures would lead Putin to reassess his scheme, but instead, the Russians have descended into barbarism: War crimes and attempted genocide are now routine parts of Russian military operations. The Kremlin (wisely, for once) has avoided attacking NATO, and for the time being, Putin has chosen to stop making nuclear threats, but the Russian war plan in Ukraine has become little more than an operation to serve Putin’s rage and slaughter Ukrainians as retribution for their resistance.

Finally, although I will always remain concerned about Russian escalation against the West, I think those risks are less severe than they were a year ago. Putin is still who he was a year ago: vain, emotional, and a terrible strategist. But I am convinced that in the early days of the war, when the very best Russian forces were suffering one defeat after another, he and his toadies in the Kremlin were gripped by panic. I wanted the West to limit the chance that Putin would do something stupid and reckless—or more stupid and reckless than attacking Ukraine in the first place.

The shock of invasion has now passed in Kyiv, and the shock of defeat has, apparently, dissipated in Moscow. The recent Victory Day parade in front of the Kremlin was a sad and desultory affair, featuring tired old men saluting one another and somehow pretending that their forces were not being immolated on a battlefield only 1,000 kilometers away.

More to the point, the other part of the escalation equation relies on time: The longer this war drags on, the greater the chance of a black-swan event or another delusional miscalculation inside the Kremlin. Although the war cannot end until Putin decides to stop pouring men and metal into battle, the Ukrainians now have a chance to inflict so much damage, and retake so much territory, that Russian leaders will have to face failure, no matter what Putin or the ghouls who serve him on Russian television say. The sooner Putin and his coterie have no choice but to let go of the last shreds of their imperial fantasies, the better.

A summer of decision has arrived, if the West is willing to help Ukraine make it one.

Related:

Cover story: the counteroffensive Only NATO intervention in Ukraine can save Putin.

Today’s News The prosecutor John Durham wrapped up his four-year investigation into the origins of the FBI probe into ties between Russia and Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, concluding that the agency was influenced by confirmation bias and operated with a “lack of analytical rigor.” A Florida teacher is under state investigation for showing a Disney movie with a gay character to her class. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, testified before Congress about the possibilities and risks of artificial intelligence. Dispatches Up for Debate: Readers tell Conor Friedersdorf what they think about the killing of Jordan Neely—and what they see as the heart of the debate surrounding the tragedy.

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Evening Read Illustration by Matthieu Bourel. Source: Katharina Behling.

Writing in the Ruins

By Gal Beckerman

If you grew up in East Germany, a country whose national anthem began, “Resurrected from the ruins, faces toward the future turned,” you might find a landscape covered in shards to be almost natural—the broken past coexisting alongside an emerging world of concrete and glass. Those ruins might even inspire an unabashed love, as they have in the German novelist Jenny Erpenbeck, born in that now-extinct country in 1967. “Steel girders. Charred beams. Walls with nothing behind them,” she writes in an essay. “Rooms where the rain falls on dead pigeons because there isn’t a roof overhead.” These are a few of her favorite things.

For Erpenbeck, who ranks among Germany’s most acclaimed writers (and is frequently mentioned as a future Nobel contender), this love comes with an ethic, one that suffuses her fiction.

Read the full article.

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Read. Emma Straub’s This Time Tomorrow, which captures the defining emotion of modern life.

Listen. Check out a curated audio collection of some of our most popular articles from last month.

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P.S.

I promise this is the last thing I’ll say about it, but if you’re a Succession fan, “my” episode—the one where I had a tiny role as a pundit named Ben Stove—aired on Sunday night. I’ve been on television many times, but catching glimpses of myself standing behind Tom Wambsgans and Greg Hirsch, or glaring down from a big-screen television while Shiv and Roman Roy argue over the future of the American republic, is still surreal. If you’d like to know what it was like behind the scenes, I wrote about the experience, and what I learned from it about both entertainment and politics, for The Atlantic’s Culture section here.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.