For twenty-five years I’ve worked inside the field that came to be known as DEI.
Over the past two years that field has been attacked, dismantled, and in many circles declared dead. Some of the criticism was badly intentioned. Some of it exposed real weaknesses we failed to confront.
But the leadership capabilities required to build trust across difference, make fair decisions under pressure, and create high-performing cultures didn’t disappear.
That’s the terrain my essay explores. Let me know what you think.
Enough of us knew the 2024 election results meant DEI was going to get decimated.
The time to prepare was before the executive orders, not after. We needed to stop fighting for the words and protect the work by changing the titles and moving what DEI was all about to other parts of the organization where it would be harder to dismantle because it was embedded in core operations.
Some organizations did that. Most didn’t.
In the aftermath, two kinds of organizations emerged. The first had been pretending DEI all along. Many were those that jumped on the DEI bandwagon in 2020–2021, not out of conviction, but not wanting to miss out on a hot trend. They had never built it into anything structural and therefore it was not durable. When the EOs came, like frightened deer, they scampered twitchily deep into the woods. The second, the true believers, like turtles in a thunderstorm, waddled off the path and into the brush to wait out the deluge. There they regrouped and figured out how to protect what they’d built all along.
A year later, in the aftermath of great losses, green shoots are breaking through the ashes of the all-consuming fire. The turtles are still here.
A year later, in the aftermath of great losses, green shoots are breaking through the ashes of the all-consuming fire.
“We ended DEI in America” was the recent proclamation. This is useful. Opponents who believe they’ve won stop hunting. The organizations that stayed the course now have more room to work precisely because the spotlight is moving on.
So what survived? What failed? And what has to change?
The Work Didn’t Go Anywhere
The campaign against DEI was coordinated, well-funded, and effective. It framed the field as ideological, coercive, anti-meritocratic, and divisive, and that framing moved fast from think tanks to state legislatures to the Department of Justice to boardrooms. Companies did what companies do when reputational risk spikes: they either eliminated or lowered the visibility of the thing under attack.
Inside those organizations, even as DEI budgets were slashed, positions eliminated or downgraded, and verbiage removed, three categories of work kept going in most places almost without interruption. One, who gets hired, promoted, paid, and who leaves. Two, whether leaders can build trust across difference and make fair decisions under pressure. And three, whether the culture produces psychological safety for its people so they feel cared for, and in turn, are able to optimize their performance.
These are fundamental operational concerns. Organizations are not going to stop caring about operations.
Also, many, many people—especially younger workers—did not abandon their expectations for fairness, belonging, and inclusion. What changed is how openly organizations talk about it, not whether their workforce cares.
Ultimately, what the opponents of DEI cannot touch are the demographics.
Ultimately, what the opponents of DEI cannot touch are the demographics.
Millennials, now in their 30s and early 40s, are already roughly 44% people of color. Gen Z has climbed to about 49%. Among Americans under 18, the majority has already arrived at 53%. This is why by 2040 half of the entire country will be people of color.
From the middle of the workforce, therefore, down to the youngest entrants, diversity is no longer an initiative. It is demographic reality.
This leads to a shift in language where the discipline formerly known as DEI can do just fine without the word “Diversity.” As a parallel example, in the early 2000s, everything was “e”—e-mail, e-commerce, e-marketing. And then it just became mail, commerce, marketing. The prefix fell away because digital had become the default. Diversity is on the same trajectory. Already “diverse workforce” is a redundancy. Diverse candidate, diverse workforce, diverse talent pipeline, diverse marketplace can simply become candidate, workforce, talent pipeline, marketplace. The noun already contains the modifier.
You can try to build walls and dams, but the demographic tide will keep rising inexorably.
Three Flaws the Field Has to Own
Clearly, the attack on DEI was badly intentioned. It was also made easier than it should have been. We found out the hard way that in some key ways the DEI discipline was built on a foundation of sand, not stone.
Let’s look at three fatal flaws.
First, we were not fully inclusive of everyone.
DEI aligned socioeconomic inequity almost exclusively with race and gender. This was necessary, important, unfinished, and factually truthful work. But we stopped short of extending this socioeconomic lens to communities that globalization left behind. Factories in rural areas that were homogeneous as well as heterogeneous closed. Jobs for millions, including a majority of white men, went away and didn’t come back. Without the education those jobs once made unnecessary, a middle-class life became inaccessible. Today white men in rural communities are the only demographic group in the United States with declining life expectancy, driven by unemployment, depression, elevated suicide rates, opioid addiction, and early death.
That pain did not make the case against racial inequity any less true. But it did create the political terrain in which DEI could be cast as selective rather than inclusive.
In addition, those in the majority in corporations did not see themselves included in corporate efforts of inclusion. Of course, many of them did not have the lived experience of those most traditionally on the margins. Yet to be told they had privilege they had to own and apologize for was not a winning starting point for them to say, “Hey, I want to be part of this movement.”
So when organizations came under fire for DEI, the whole concept of allyship remained shallow and many in the majority had no particular reason to defend an inclusion field that hadn’t made room for them.
Second, we spoke the wrong currency inside the corporation.
My motivation for this work comes, in part, from Catholic liberation theology roots that get me out of bed in the morning with a clear sense of what justice requires. That force is real. But a motivation is not a business case, and corporate America is a different republic with its own currency, transactions, and definitions of value.
If I land at O’Hare with a pocket full of Peruvian soles, I cannot buy an espresso at Starbucks. The soles have real value. I earned them. But I can’t transact with them in the U.S. I have to go to the exchange, convert them to dollars, and only then can I get my coffee. The original value doesn’t disappear. But if I refuse to convert it, I can’t address my jet lag.
In the Discipline Formerly Known as DEI, we refused to convert. We spent justice currency inside an institution that runs on profit currency. We felt that speaking in moral imperatives, especially after the horror of George Floyd’s videotaped murder, would be enough. It was enough to elicit massive waves of personal and societal reckoning, but corporate leaders still were listening for operational consequences. As we perfected prophetic rhetoric over delivering lasting results, we forfeited the opportunity to make the conversion.
As we perfected prophetic rhetoric over delivering lasting results, we forfeited the opportunity to make the conversion.
For a while, when DEI was popular and CEOs were making pledges, the corporation could afford to wave the justice flag. But when the assault came and leaders were asked point blank how DEI contributes to the objectives of their enterprise, most of us had no compelling answer in the currency that mattered. The correlation between diversity and business performance existed. It was documented and real, but we could not explain how that happened. We had correlation but not an explanation of how it happened and therefore how to replicate and accelerate it. So it fell.
Justice matters enormously, of course. But that’s the currency to be used in the courts, in the streets, in the voting booth, in community organizing. In the corporation, however, if we want to be resourced and protected, we need to make the case in terms the corporation can transact with. That’s not surrender. That’s knowing which republic you’re operating in.
Third, we isolated ourselves inside the organization.
DEI consistently had tension with Legal, HR, corporate communications, and the P&L owners—in part a logical consequence of using justice currency within the corporation. DEI often felt it was fighting a lone-wolf battle in a place that did not understand what it was about. In that isolation it largely kept to itself with isolated programs, limited relationships, and narrow authority. The Discipline Formerly Known as DEI faltered in the strategic leadership and influence required to lead change across the entire enterprise and its many stakeholders. It was present in the organization, but not embedded into it.
When the assault came, there were too few in adjacent functions who felt invested enough to step up. The C-suite, under pressure, could not find internal champions across functions to defend what DEI was doing, because DEI hadn’t built those alliances when there was time. We were exposed because we were not integrated.
These three reasons are leadership challenges that must be addressed, not to restore what was, but to reimagine what needs to be.
What Got Decimated—and What Didn’t
The attack was targeted and it was primarily about power. It went after leaders who could be removed from government and institutional positions. It went after the mechanisms built to diversify the leadership pipeline: fellowship programs, differentiated development tracks, sponsorship and mentorship initiatives, and dismantled or criminalized many of them. That damage is real and will take years to repair. There are no clear answers yet while many of those mechanisms—where we had begun to see progress come from—remain legally exposed.
The attack was targeted and it was primarily about power.
At entry-level and mid-level, though, the diversity pipeline is intact. More Black women are earning advanced degrees than at any point in history. The 18-to-24-year-old Latino college enrollment rate has grown from 22% in 2000 to 36% today. Latinos are projected to account for more than half of net new entrants into the U.S. labor force this decade.
Demography is doing work no executive order can reverse.
The remaining question is whether organizations build systems that let that talent rise to its full potential, or whether bias in promotion, compensation, and opportunity allocation reproduces the old hierarchies with a new demographic base at the bottom. That is a governance question. And governance, by definition, belongs to the people who own the system, not the people advocating for the changes.
DEI did not have control of the very mechanisms that needed to be addressed. This belongs to HR, to Legal, to the P&L owners, to the C-suite—not to a standalone DEI office that few backed when things got too hard.
From Compliance to Character
In disruption, the leaders who make a difference are the ones who see not only the existential threat, but who see the opportunity disruption brings to reimagine, redesign, reinvent.
The next stage of this work is not compliance. It is character. This is what the moment demands, as the questions that matter inside organizations sound different now from five years ago: not Are we committed to diversity? but:
- Can this leader build trust in a heterogeneous team?
- Can they make fair decisions under pressure?
- Can they navigate conflict without defaulting to avoidance or control?
- Can they maintain what is true even when the playbook they once relied on is gone?
These are leadership competencies. They can be assessed, developed, and measured. That reframing, from moral commitment to operational capability, is not a retreat. It’s a coming of age.
A second shift is from representation to institutional performance. Not just who is in the room, but whether the systems governing hiring, promotion, compensation, and opportunity allocation produce fair and effective outcomes regardless of who occupies which positions.
A third shift is from program to operating system. Less focus on events—the annual training, the heritage month, the speaker series—and more in how organizations actually run: hiring processes, decision frameworks, promotion criteria, conflict resolution mechanisms, performance evaluation systems. Because fairer systems do not only reduce distortion inside the workforce; they also sharpen an enterprise’s ability to understand and serve a marketplace no longer homogeneous.
The shift of greatest consequence? Leadership character. In a world of great disruption, chaos, and fear, character-based leadership is needed more than ever. Who has the authenticity, humility, courage, and kindness to navigate difference without becoming defensive or ideological?
In a world of great disruption, chaos, and fear, character-based leadership is needed more than ever.
This is where the work belongs. Not in the compliance department but in leadership development. Not Did we follow the rules? but Do our leaders have what it takes to lead across difference under pressure?
The Work Has Begun to Mature
Resurrecting the old language is not the path forward. It has forced the field to separate what was cherished from what was actually durable.
The work of inclusion, fairness, and institutional equity continues being done right now—rigorously, under different names, with stronger integration and a business case that can survive scrutiny.
The workforce is growing more diverse, not less. Political polarization is infecting organizational cultures and requires inclusion interventions. AI is raising new questions about bias and fairness in decision-making, and the Discipline Formerly Known as DEI has the answers and skills to address them. Generational shifts are bringing new expectations into every workplace.
The pressure to address inclusion issues is increasing, not decreasing. The drivers are now demographic, technological, cultural, and operational all at once.
The forest fire is over. What grows from the ashes doesn’t have to look like what burned. The discipline formerly called DEI has an opportunity to become something it never fully was: embedded, integrated, evidence-based, character-rooted, built on stone instead of sand.
That’s the work.
