How did DEI go wrong and what can we do now?

Farra Trompeter: Welcome to the Smart Communications podcast. This is Farra Trompeter, co-director and worker-owner. Today we are going to ask the question: how did DEI go wrong and what can we do now? And today’s guest is actually, this is her second time on the podcast. Minal Bopaiah was with us back on episode 95 in 2021 when we recorded a conversation entitled Equity: How can we design organizations where everyone thrives? And here we are, three years later, and we’ll be reflecting on how things have changed and well, how they’ve stayed the same. But let me first remind you and tell you a bit about Minal. Minal Bopaiah, she/her is an award-winning author, keynote speaker, and equity strategist. She founded Brevity & Wit, a strategy and design firm that helps organizations achieve the change they want to see in the world. Her first book, Equity: How to design organizations where everyone thrives, was awarded the 2022 Terry McAdam Book Award for the book most likely to change the way nonprofit professionals work. She’s happiest when sharing her infectious enthusiasm for diversity, equity, and inclusion with audiences around the world. And we are happy to have her back. Minal, welcome back to the show.

Minal Bopaiah: Thank you, Farra. It’s always wonderful to be in conversation with you.

Farra Trompeter: Likewise. Well, we are recording this episode in July 2024. Four years after George Floyd’s murder, three years after your book was published and one month since the Supreme Court case that blocked Fearless Fund from giving grants only to Black women. The world and nonprofit sector has been on a rollercoaster ride when it comes to understanding, working toward, and fighting back against attacks related to diversity, equity, and inclusion. And a few months ago you wrote a blog post called 10 ways DEI went wrong and what to do now. I was struck by that blog post to reach out to you for today’s conversation and you were gracious enough to come back. And I’m just wondering if we could start with that blog post: Can you share what led you to write it and maybe any reactions you’ve received to it?

Minal Bopaiah: Yeah. As a DEI practitioner, I’m not unaware of the attacks. That blog post was really an act of love because I love this field. I love the nature of the work, I love also the people doing the work. And when you love something, you have to be able to have difficult conversations. And part of this work is also loving humanity. Some days more abstractly than concretely, but you know, and so if you’re living in a society that is angry at you for the thing that you’re doing that you love the most, you have to be able to have that conversation. And having that conversation means knowing what your boundaries are, being able to call “bullshit” but then also being able to clean up your side of the street. Being able to look at ourselves and be like, “Okay, is there even a grain of truth in some of these attacks?”

Minal Bopaiah: The way most of the attacks are made, I think are unfounded because they are really a masking for a pro-discrimination, pro-patriarchy, pro-white-supremacy agenda. However, they’re gaining traction with people who have had some bad experiences with DEI. And I saw this happening even after 2020: a lot of people had good intentions, but good intentions are not enough and we should know that in the nonprofit world. Being passionate, wanting to do good is not enough of a qualification for doing work that really significantly impacts people’s lives. It felt like we needed to have that conversation and be able to learn from past mistakes and be able to do this work with more intellectual rigor and integrity because the work is too important to abandon it. So we gotta just do it better. And that being said, the reaction has been fairly positive. I mean, the blog post got nearly 3,000 views, which is a lot for us in my small world. And then I think a lot of people have shared it, a lot of people have reached out and there wasn’t any particular backlash from the DEI practitioner community. So I felt like it resonated with a lot of people what I was saying.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned DEI is about having difficult conversations and sitting in discomfort. And so that means sometimes the field has to sit in that as well. So that’s an interesting way of thinking about it that hadn’t really come to mind before we had this conversation. And if folks haven’t read the blog post, we will link to it on the Brevity & Wit website. You can go to their website and find it. Or if you go to bigduck.com/insights and read the transcript for this conversation, we will be sure to actively link to it there as well.

Farra Trompeter: Now, Minal, I know you believe that equity is about practices and systems and on the podcast episode we recorded back in 2021, you mentioned that “the hardest part about equity is that it requires being able to see the system, which not everybody does naturally.” And I’m just curious, here we are, you know, three years later, has that gotten better, worse, or just different given all this social pushback that we’re seeing here in the US to efforts pursuing equity?

Minal Bopaiah: Yeah, I think people’s ability to see the system has gotten better, which is what is contributing to the backlash. Because I think people were really happy with DEI when it could be like just an interpersonal problem and you could blame an individual and it gave people an out. And now that people see the system and people are actually trying to advocate for systemic change that is giving the people who are used to holding power the most anxiety because that means a real shift in things. It doesn’t mean you just have to be more polite to your Black neighbor, right? It means resources are gonna be allocated differently. And that I think is a much scarier change for people.

Farra Trompeter: Definitely. Now let’s bring it to the sort of organizational level. For nonprofit staff out there who are listening to this podcast and pushing for equity within their organizations or communities, I know that they’re experiencing high levels of burnout and frustration because of all this backlash. And I’m just curious if you have any advice on how they can sustain themselves when things seem to keep moving backwards?

Minal Bopaiah: Yeah, so this is the most popular question I get. Like the most frequently asked question. Yes, you should do self-care. That’s important. But really it it starts way before that. It’s really a mindset shift that needs to happen. My question is, if you’re feeling burnt out: First, do you actually think you’re gonna end all of this oppression? If you do, then we need to have a conversation because as I write in that blog post, that is like somebody becoming a doctor and saying that ‘I will have a successful career if I end all illness”. We would never set that burden upon a singular doctor. We would never expect that. And if somebody said that to us, we would, like, sit them down and be like, “We need to have a talk because that is not a realistic life goal and you are absolutely gonna burn yourself out.”

Minal Bopaiah: This work, I think, is a form of caretaking like medicine or nursing or education or caregiving. And there will always be injustices that need to be healed and need to be addressed. Even if we stopped all the manmade ones, there’s still other ones. People die tragically. People get incurable diseases. Or even the systems of oppression evolve like we now have AI, which was never a thing that DEI practitioners had to worry about 20 years ago, right? Oppression evolves, injustice evolves, and changes. You are in the profession of stewarding justice and well-being for society. That does not mean that you will accomplish justice and well-being in its totality for society during your lifetime and your career, right? And so you have to have the mindset, I think, of a doctor who’s like treating a particular disease or a particular patient population that “I will do right and act ethically, which with every singular patient” or if you’re a DEI practitioner, “every singular organization” if you’re a nonprofit professional, “every singular community” that you interact with. That should be your standard of success.

Minal Bopaiah: And the other part of it is to understand, and I read this, it was like some meme when I was like scrolling through social media when people like to have bar conversations about time travel, we are so focused on The Butterfly Effect. And if we were to travel back in time, God forbid we do any small thing that would change the trajectory of the present. What we don’t think about is the small thing we could do now that might change the trajectory of the future. So I’ll give you a very concrete example. Dr. Cole, Johnnetta Betsch Cole, who is my mentor, and the first African American woman president of Spelman College in 1987. When she was at Spelman in the Eighties and Nineties, there was a Black lesbian association and they stood up during a town hall and asked her like, “We can’t get recognized by the board of trustees, by the college.” And because Dr. Cole was good friends with Audre Lorde, she basically took the decision as college president, “As of right now, I recognize you.” And so she just recognized the Black Lesbian Association. Now because Spelman was very rooted in the Black church, which in the Eighties and Nineties had a very strong undercurrent of homophobia, she got a ton of pushback from the alumni, from parents, from the board of trustees, and things like that. Thirty years later, Spelman was the second HBCU to admit transgender students. The first was Bennett College where she had also served as president. So, you have to think of your actions in terms of that sort of butterfly effect: that the small things you do, even when they get pushback, help move the needle over the course of decades. And they are important for those future ripples. And you don’t know what those ripples will be, that’s out of your control. But you can act now with integrity to start modeling what that should look like for future generations to come.

Farra Trompeter: I appreciate that and I know that the pace of change can feel slow, and you might not always see the impact of that ripple, right? Yeah. It may be in the organization after you leave, it changes, and you did make that impact. And that can be hard to find satisfying. I do wanna keep in the spirit of success and DEI practitioners, picking up on something you said. Now, as we saw organizations rush to embrace DEI in 2020, some of it may have been focused more externally than internally. We saw a bit of that. Lots of statements and external commitments. Others may have rushed to hire outside practitioners to “fix things for them”. And here we are now four years later, some organizations have abandoned DEI efforts. Some have decided to focus internally, whatever it may be. For those who are out there who are thinking about hiring consultants or practitioners to support their DEI efforts, what questions should they have in mind? If I am an organization or a leader or a staff person looking to hire a consultant or practitioner to help me advance DEI efforts, what should I be looking for? What should I be asking?

Minal Bopaiah: I think the first thing is that the organization has to have realistic expectations. We often get these RFPs that are like, you know, help us solve racism, or like some version of that, right? And I’m like, okay,

Farra Trompeter: In two years…

Minal Bopaiah: Yeah, in two years with 50 people and $10,000, right? And I’m like, okay, well we’re not doing that. I think they need to really scale down your goals and your promises and then hire someone who has experience solving for the type of problem that you’re having. Be able to articulate what problem DEI is solving in your organization. And then is it a culture problem? Is it a management problem? Is it a leadership problem? Is it a problem with a particular identity? So you wanna hire people who have some experience in those fields because DEI is a very big umbrella. So you need to be able to notch it down a little bit. The other part of it is when you’re scaling it down and hiring for it, you almost wanna under-promise and over-deliver. When organizations and nonprofits––who we know, there’s a lot of white people working in nonprofits––say things like, we’re gonna be an anti-racist organization, or we’re gonna achieve racial equity. There’s good intentions behind that. But as a person of color, if I read that and then you’ve stated something you can’t really accomplish, what happens is that I then feel like it’s been a bait and switch. So you erode trust with the communities that you’re actually trying to attract into your organization, or trying to build a bridge with. And the way to actually have deeper trust with those communities is to underpromise and then overdeliver on your commitments. Make the commitment very small but tangible that you could actually realize in a year or two. That is how you build longstanding trust.

Minal Bopaiah: And then the last thing I would say for nonprofits is there are times when you wanna hire external people to come in. Just like there are times when you wanna hire an external comms team or web developer or web agency. That’s not the problem. The problem is that you need to understand that like your website and your IT department, this is now a sustained position. This is now in your budgets forever and ever and ever. In the world that we’re living in, which is so volatile and ambiguous and so many things are changing at such a high speed, there is always gonna be a need for behavior and culture change in organizations because that’s how organizations adapt and innovate. And so you need either a position or a department that is committed to understanding how many changes are happening in the organization and how do we steward all those changes, including changes around DEI and equity and inclusion and making the workplace more inclusive and more fair for people regardless of their identity? Just like when your website went up, some people thought they could just hire somebody and leave it alone. Like, we realize that’s not true. Like, a website is a living, breathing animal that needs constant maintenance. It’s the same thing for your DEI work and your organization.

Farra Trompeter: Yeah, what I hear in that answer that you gave is that you have to be really clear internally about what you’re looking for and maybe right-size those expectations before you figure out, are we hiring outside? Are we doing this internally? And again, what’s your long-term plan to keep it alive? So I appreciate that. Now, I know from conversations I’ve had with nonprofit staff over the years that some folks get stuck because they’re worried about saying the wrong thing. I will say that happens as a white person who is passionate and committed to this work, I’ve often had that worry myself. And when we prepped for this conversation, you shared that you think people need to let go of being right and focus on being effective. And that really stuck with me. And I’m just curious, what advice do you have for folks who may be working with leaders or colleagues and they tend to get stuck?

Minal Bopaiah: I often say that DEI work should start with teaching people how to apologize. Like when you start gymnastics, they teach you how to fall first so you don’t break your neck while trying new things. It’s a little bit the same thing, right? So just learn what a good apology is and so then you can clean it up. I just actually had to do it this morning to one of our consultants. It wasn’t a microaggression, but I just sort of said something and it wasn’t really true. And she’s like, “No, that’s not how it happened.” I was like, “I’m sorry, I apologize.” Learn how to apologize. Get that muscle memory so that you can recover quickly. Because inevitably, like gymnastics, you will fall on your face at some point it’s okay.

Farra Trompeter: And if you’re doing the work right, you’re gonna fall a lot.

Minal Bopaiah: Yeah, so just learn how to fall and get back up. The other side of it is, in a lot of progressive-leaning spaces, there is this sort of harshness. People are so quick to call people out. And not that people shouldn’t be held accountable, but the most succinct way I know how to say this is: intellectual snobbery is the Achilles heel of both DEI and progressive causes. When you get too concerned with being right, what you end up doing is using your power in unethical ways to make somebody else feel small for not knowing as much as you. And that is really inappropriate and not in the spirit of DEI. DEI should never make somebody feel small. One of our ground rules we like to have during workshops is just “be aware that people are speaking in rough draft. It’s not a fully polished piece. They’re still speaking it.” And you can hold them accountable, but also don’t be so concerned about the words and being right, because like I said, it’s more important to be effective than to be right. And being effective is building a bridge across difference. Not making somebody feel small for being wrong. So I think that is really important in these spaces that we let go of using our intelligence to protect ourselves. It’s a form of perfectionism on some way. It’s also, I think, one of the biggest critiques of the Left that I think is valid. Remember hearing a woman once who was a waitress down in Capitol Hill here in DC and she said the Capitol Hill staffers would come, and the Republican staffers were always exponentially nicer to the wait staff than the Democratic staffers. They just treated them more civilly. I think that’s actually why the Right gets people to support them because they don’t make people who are not as educated feel stupid or small. And I think the Left has to learn that lesson and how to include people who may not be as intelligent as they are.

Farra Trompeter: Hmm. I’m gonna be reflecting on that one for a bit now. Getting deep here. In the spirit of being the bridge and thinking about progress, let’s talk just a bit more about what needs to happen moving forward. Can you share a little bit about what you think that is and maybe offer some tips for how organizations can build a strong internal culture that advances DEI efforts on an ongoing basis? Really adding more to that thread earlier or you can’t just write a plan or write a commitment and then come back to it in three years. You’ve gotta take care of this on an ongoing basis. What does that look like?

Minal Bopaiah: Yeah, so I think in the nonprofit world, we really need to invest in leadership development across the board. And particularly growing leaders who have emotional maturity. I think we get so hung up on impact and part of the problem around this is the nonprofit myth of not spending money on overhead, which I’m sure you’ve talked about that on your podcast and why that’s not how we should be evaluating nonprofits. But if you invest in leadership development, then your leaders will have the emotional maturity to be able to surface conflict, have difficult conversations, make better decisions. And that’s really needed for this work. It’s not emotionally mature to say that I just don’t wanna have this conversation ’cause it makes me uncomfortable, or I’m gonna ignore this problem. It’s not emotionally mature to spew out every book you’ve read to make somebody feel stupid that they don’t know as much as you. That’s also not emotionally mature. So I think that’s really important.

Minal Bopaiah: I think you need to make sure that your goals match your investment. Like I said, under promise over deliver. But then also, yes, there are overhead problems in nonprofits. So instead of saying, we are gonna accomplish this big hairy, audacious goal with a budget of $10,000, and this idea of “do more with less”, which is completely nonsensical. I don’t know how that’s an expression. We need to say, “Okay, here are our main problems. What can we do with $10,000 that has the highest return on investment for our culture and for the employees?” That’s how we have to set it sometimes if your budgets are limited. Look at your budget and then figure out what you can do well with that amount of money and start there.

Minal Bopaiah: And then the third thing is you can’t actually control what people think. And if you’re trying to, you’re really engaging in propaganda, which I don’t think DEI should. The D and DEI is for diversity. People get to be different. They get to think different things. They get to believe different things. That’s and, and so long as they’re not engaging in dehumanization, that should be okay. I think some nonprofits, because they have a lot of smart people working there, have overemphasized education and like learning all the words and all the theories and all the forms of oppression. That’s not what this work is about. This work is about behavior and culture change. It’s like saying that the person who knows the most about medicine is the healthiest individual. That’s not it. It’s the person who actually, like, engages in healthy behaviors. So be really specific about focusing on the behaviors that you want in your culture. Not trying to convince everybody to think the same or to have the same political beliefs or the same values. One, it’s not effective. Two, it’s dangerous because I think it does get us into propaganda. I was talking with another DEI practitioner, I don’t know if you’ve seen that show, A Gentleman in Moscow?

Farra Trompeter: I haven’t watched that one yet.

Minal Bopaiah: Yeah, it’s with Ewan McGregor, it, it’s not bad, but it’s about revolutionary Russia. And I was like, “Oh, this is how progressive values go wrong.” They’re trying to get everybody to believe the same thing instead of enacting policies that would actually benefit the most people and doing sort of a litmus test on beliefs and basically either killing or disenfranchising anybody who believes differently. And I was like, “Yeah, that’s not what we want. That’s not what this work is about”. There are oppressive forms of government on both the Right and the Left. And I’m not saying that we have to toe the middle path in terms of political beliefs, especially when things are swinging so far in one direction. But we have to toe the middle path between the needs of the individual, the needs of the group, the right to autonomy and difference, and the need for collaboration and cooperation. So this work is really about bridging across what may seem like opposing forces, but you actually need both of those values to be healthy as a society.

Farra Trompeter: Well, on that note, you’ve given us lots to think about. You’ve given me a new TV show to watch. Thank you for that. I wanna thank you for joining us again. And if you’re out there and you’d like to know more about Minal’s work or access resources related to her book or check out this blog post we’ve been talking about, be sure to visit brevityandwit.com. Again, we’ll have lots of links to the various topics we discussed today at bigduck.com/insights. And again, Minal. Thank you.

Minal Bopaiah: Thank you, Farra. It’s always a delight.

Farra Trompeter: Alright everyone, have a great day out there.