Anti-DEI sentiments are nothing new.
But, with the most recent pushback from the federal government, there’s misunderstanding and confusion about how companies can move forward, said Alaysia Black Hackett, the former chief diversity and equity officer at the Department of Labor, during a recent interview with HR Brew at the Workhuman conference in Denver.
“What I believe is happening…is a lack of understanding of what [DEI] is and what it isn’t,” Black Hackett said. “When people hear DEIA [diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility] now, they hear Black communities, Black hires, Black people, and it’s this idea that we’re taking away from people who are qualified to give to ‘less-qualified Black applicants’…that is not what it is at all.”
As a response to the growing backlash, HR leaders should start educating themselves and their employees on the history of DEI and how it affects the workplace today, Black Hackett said, because “we want [DEI] to mirror our country, and our country is very diverse, and it’s becoming more diverse.”
What anti-DEI backlash overlooks. The Trump administration issued a January executive order (EO) claiming to restore focus on meritocracy and another EO dismantling DEI in the federal government. Black Hackett said that approach can overlook US history and systemic issues.
She shared how her father, who is 81, grew up as a sharecropper in South Carolina, as an example of how the effects of slavery continued long after its abolition. Similarly, people of color still face biases in hiring, income disparities, and a lack of leadership representation several decades after desegregation.
“People don’t understand that the systems that were put into place back then, still have the dominant, prevailing decision-making [factor] for most of the things that we do in our country,” Black Hackett said. “While, yes, we don’t have slavery in the sense that it was then. We don’t have segregation as it was. A lot of those laws are still embedded in [today’s] systems.”
In light of the president’s push for meritocracy, companies can evaluate applicants on their merits, but it also requires an “understanding [of] how much harder [some] individuals had to work to even get an opportunity to be at the door,” she said. Sometimes hiring is guised as merit-based when it’s actually biased or preferential treatment, like “Bob knows Dylan, and they are golf buddies, so it’s like, ‘Well, I know someone, so let’s hire this person,’” she added.
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Black Hackett said some companies that retracted DEI commitments and rolled back programming may have never had DEI “embedded” in their culture in the first place. “They never went into their structure and said, ‘This is how we’re going to do things’...so it was easy to say, ‘Okay, it’s here now. It’s gone tomorrow,” she explained.
How progress will continue. Black Hackett said she’s optimistic about the future of DEI, as a leader who has dedicated more than two decades to this work. “You may not hear about it as loud as you’ve heard about it in the last seven-to-10 years, but that’s just temporary,” she said.
“A lot of what is being said is ‘rollback’ is not. It’s rebranding…and it’s okay. The most important thing is that this work continues,” she said. “I really believe that DEIA is resilient. It may not be called DEIA, it may not have any kind of language to put with it, but the work will continue because it’s resilient.”
When President Trump entered the Oval Office, one of his first executive orders dissolved all DEI departments in the federal government, including Black Hackett’s role at the Department of Labor.
“My departing email to my colleagues at the Department of Labor, I remember one line I put in there, and I said, ‘I believe in you and in the work that we’ve done in the last three years that I’ve been here and never forget your ability to be a voice and how a well-positioned question can shift a whole meeting,’” she said. “Everybody has to be an ambassador, so everybody takes on this responsibility.”