How DEI Died | WIRED

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Three letters D, E, I have become a slur, a dog whistle for woke and black. How did that happen? From America's first attempts at inclusion to the boom of the George Floyd economy to the bulldozing of DEI by Trump, I'm about to walk you through a turbulent and totally true history of the war over diversity, equity, and inclusion. This is Trendlines. For my latest article, I spoke to more than 30 professionals in the DEI space in order to understand the rise of DEI and what caused it to DIIE. Let's go over the timeline. The first big federal experiment in inclusion starts way back in 1865. Within a year of emancipation, Congress creates the Freeman's Bureau and suddenly education opens up to the formerly enslaved. By the early 1870s, black schools are packed, and with federal troops still stationed in the South, [music] enforcing voting rights, black political power surges. More than 600 black state legislators, 16 black members of Congress, [music] and two US senators were elected. In 1877, reconstruction ends, and that entire [music] political infrastructure collapses. Jim Crow and the clan erase a decade of progress for nearly a century. By the way, this isn't going to be a video on the history of racism. I'm just making this point to show how real civil rights gains can be wiped away in an instant. Fast forward to 1948. President Truman [music] desegregates the US military, ordering equality of treatment and opportunity in the armed forces, no matter your race, color, religion, or national origin. So now we're shifting from don't segregate to you must actively ensure equal opportunity, which is basically DEI logic. 1964, Title [music] 7 of the Civil Rights Act bans discrimination and employment. This is the legal backbone for modern DEI in workplaces. Then LBJ signs an executive order requiring federal contractors to not only avoid discrimination, but to take affirmative [music] action and hiring more employees of color. This is basically the OG federal DEI policy for the private sector. In 1972, the EEOC starts enforcing affirmative action. Employers now have to show receipts to prove they're tracking under representation in the workforce. The University of Michigan launches one of the first campus offices of affirmative action with many other schools like Harvard [music] following by 1975. By 1977, companies with federal contracts equal opportunity divisions. [music] But the following year, the Supreme Court rules on Baky, a white applicant who challenges UC Davis's [music] 16 seat minority quota. The court kills racial quotas and launches the era of holistic review, where race becomes just one factor in the admissions mix. In the mid 1980s, President Reagan's playbook was to cut enforcement and kneecap the affirmative action system without formally killing it. In 1987, a game-changing labor report predicts the next generation of workers will be mostly women, immigrants, and people of color. It was called Workforce 2000. Businesses freak out. They are not ready for what's coming. And suddenly, diversity training becomes a must-have line item in HR budgets. Cue those corny training videos we were all forced to watch. In today's multicultural [music] workplace, respecting our differences is key. So whether you're closing a deal >> throughout the '9s, consulting firms spring up and for years, companies perform random acts of diversity. By the time the pandemic hits [music] in March 2020, DEI felt like it was softening. Weakened by compromise and decades of lawsuits, it feels more like a box to check rather than real change. Then something happened that reignited the national dialogue around racial justice. >> [music] >> the killing of George Floyd on May 25th, 2020. Floyd's death forced the hand of corporate America. And as leaders across tech, [music] entertainment, finance, and advertising pledged to rectify past wrongs, all of a sudden there was a premium on black talent. Tech company Twilio launches an anti-racism [music] initiative inspired by the philosophy in the bestseller How to be an anti-racist, which dropped the previous [music] summer. The book gave corporate America a new vocabulary for treating racism as a set of choices, not an identity. When I spoke to Verernie Meyers, Netflix's [music] VP of inclusion strategy at the time, she described DEI as the scaffolding [music] that made more possible for middle-class people of color to reverse the economic disadvantages they faced. The reality is that less than 1% of all venture capital is raised by black founders, and that percentage has actually been going down over the last several years. That year, DEI became a national talking point and corporate activism went into overdrive. McKenzie Consultants estimate corporate America had announced about 66 billion in commitment so far to DEI. On January 20th, 2021, newly elected President Biden revives federal DEI with an executive order, pushing every federal agency to advance racial equity and opening a door for private sector companies to follow suit. As workplace culture changed, many black employees felt a sense of empowerment in their new roles. And with new roles came a sense of authority. For a while, everything seemed like it might work out. Throughout 2021, [music] 83% of US organizations had implemented DEI initiatives. And as corporate pocketbooks opened up, it created a new industry of DEI practitioners with huge salaries. I mean, had the title chief diversity officer ever been more in vogue? This is the peak of what many began referring to as the George Floyd economy. Still, many were suspecting that this wasn't a real fix for a broken system. I mean, how do you suddenly hire 20% more black people after decades of not doing that? Consultant Darren Martin Jr. of Bold Culture told me, quote, "It was positive [music] discrimination. Companies were trying to do more things more radically in too short a time." All of a sudden, there was this expectation that 100-year-old companies could somehow install a chief diversity officer and they would solve racism overnight. But the job of DEI pros wasn't to do that. Their job was to make recommendations on how to better support black employees. The most obvious way to do that is better pay and promotions, but that doesn't give corporations the headlines that they want. Almost all of the DEI leaders I spoke to from my article agreed on one point. They were set up to fail. Corporate America, it turned out, wasn't all that interested in the business of change. And before long, the tide shifted. DEI fatigue was on the rise. In November 2022, Elon Musk buys Twitter and cuts its workforce by 75%. As a backlash commenced, DEI budgets were the first ones to get slashed as soon as the economy got tight, and positions tied to DEI were on the chopping block. By the end of 2022, DEI was drifting from boom to bust. Retaliation was inevitable. In February 2023, McKenzie [music] adds up all the racial equity commitments companies had made after George Floyd, and the total comes to a whopping $340 billion. But it wasn't money spent. A lot of it amounted to empty promises. The summer of [music] 2023 is a watershed moment. On June 29th, the Supreme Court strikes down affirmative action in [music] college admissions, insisting that race cannot be a factor at all. Period. [music] In July, 13 Republican state attorney generals notified 100 of the largest US [music] companies that the ruling can also apply to private entities, including employers. The next month, Edward Bloom, the activist behind the Supreme Court case, sues the Fearless Fund, an Atlanta VC backing black women entrepreneurs. A federal appeals court agreed, ruling the fund violated the Civil Rights Act of 1866 by offering grants only to black women. It's crazy to see laws meant to protect black people now being used against them. By the end of 2023, Meta, Tesla, Door Dash, and Lyft reduce the size of their DEI teams by 50% or more. It's open season on raceconscious initiatives. Throughout the election year, DEI jobs shrink another 8% as candidate Donald Trump promises to dismantle DEI, putting [music] further chills on corporate hiring and expansion. Then on a cold morning inside Washington DC's Capital One arena, the battle lines of the future again come into sharp focus. It was only hours into a new American regime when President Trump signs an executive order to end quote radical and wasteful preferencing and federal agencies. His encore was an order targeting DEI in the private [music] sector, installing hatchetmen in the DOJ and FCC and turning DEI into his latest woke boogeyman. Trump has taken a uniquely hostile stance on issues of diversity since returning to Washington. On March 15th, 2025, [music] the Arlington National Cemetery website removes pages about black, Hispanic, and women veterans under the administration's anti-dei purge. A few days later, Trump issues an executive order restoring [music] truth and sanity to American history, targeting the Smithsonian Institution museums, including the National Museum of African-American History and Culture, for promoting quote divisive narratives. Plus, with the help of Doge, he's been enforcing federal job cuts, a sector where black workers [music] have been traditionally over represented, accounting for nearly 20% of the federal civilian workforce compared to their 13% share of the US population. So, no surprise, in August 2025, black unemployment spikes to 7.5%, its highest point since the 2021 pandemic. Let me be frank, the black middle class is being erased. Black people have long had a target on their back throughout our country's history. No other race has been as exploited, as gruesomely enslaved, or as continually disenfranchised. And yet, maybe DEI should die. I mean, all the DEI pros I spoke to agreed that the goals around DEI were never all that clear. Maybe it was a little too performative. Maybe the DEI leaders had too little control. Maybe it all went a little too far. Us versus them. I mean, sure, Trump is smashing DEI to pieces. But some folks will also argue his rage is proof of how far the movement has come. Maybe we were making progress. I guess that's what made DEI so dangerous to the people who ultimately wanted to maintain the status quo. It would have elevated not just a few people, but the fortune of many and perhaps would have been a real start at reorganizing America's class dynamic. And that was the scary part. So, where does DEI go next? Will the mission change? Is there still hope for what it can accomplish? I've been trying not to adopt such a fatalist attitude, but maybe this is just the natural end of things. And maybe this [music] version of DEI in the workforce, the one obsessed with hollow representation and corporate theater, has to die. And maybe that's the only way to bring it back to life in a way that actually benefits people. I'm Jason Parr. Thanks [music] for watching.