A few things have stood out immediately as top actions during the first few months of President Donald J. Trump’s second term: Thousands of federal job cuts; tariffs enacted against Canada, Mexico, and China as well as sweeping changes to U.S. allyship with various countries; and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and concepts have virtually become dirty words. 

One can argue though, that when it comes to the latter, DEI programs and initiatives were already under attack even before the current administration was sworn into power.  

Consider the Supreme Court’s gutting of affirmative action programs in June of 2023, which “effectively ended race-conscious admissions programs at colleges and universities across the country,” when a six-justice conservative majority invalidated admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. 

Now, under the Trump administration, DEI programs in federal offices are instructed to end, with the issuing of a January 21 executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity “and a January 20 executive order focused on DEI titled “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.” 

As summarized in this brief by Harvard Law School, the orders direct the Attorney General along with the heads of several relevant agencies to “identify private sector companies with ‘egregious and discriminatory’ DEI programs.… The executive orders … cease virtually all DEI-related activities in the federal workforce, and rescind a number of DEI-related executive orders issued by prior administrations …” 

Seeing the proverbial writing on the federal government wall, many companies in the private sector followed suit in rolling back their DEI initiatives, including Target, Amazon, Walmart, Meta, McDonalds, and Goldman Sachs. But several questions have emerged from all these changes, actions and rhetoric around DEI: Do we even fully understand what DEI means and what it does for workplaces, schools, and beyond? Will DEI as a concept really fully go away? How can changes to DEI be better for all of us? Will DEI re-emerge to be called something else? 

Do We Know What DEI Really Means? 

Diversity, equity, and inclusion. What does that exactly mean? I reached out to Farah Salam Hottle, the founder of Origins Consulting Group and the former DEI chair council with Vaco Holdings, a portfolio company that manages and consults with several brands around cyber security, cyber solutions, and management consulting. She explained that diversity refers to our human differences, both visible and invisible, meaning “your gender, your race, your socioeconomic status, your parental status, all sorts of dimensions of our identity. A lot of people mistake diversity to be [just about] the external and visible dimensions, because these are easy to discriminate against. But really, it’s about how we are all different as humans.” 

Equity, she explained, is simply ensuring everyone has everything they need to succeed. “Acknowledging that people are at different starting points and need different things to succeed. People who are neurodivergent, people who are deaf – those needs are different. It’s a principle of fairness.” 

And inclusion is feeling comfortable to show up as your true authentic self without fear of retaliation or fear of judgment, Hottle said. 

So why are so many, including the Trump administration, coming down on DEI? “It’s because there’s a lot of misunderstanding around what the intent is. 

And there’s also a lot of misinformation and ignorance around equity itself. There’s a sort of resistance to and rejection of this idea that certain people have been systematically marginalized and discriminated against – systemically and structurally. Not everyone really buys into that. They think you’re just complaining or you’re just being sensitive,” Hottle said. 

A recent episode of “Fresh Air,” hosted by Tonya Mosely, explored the challenges in discussing the merits of DEI when different sides of the political spectrum cannot agree upon what it is.  

She spoke with DEI experts Frank Dobbin, a professor of sociology at Harvard University, and Ella Washington, an organizational psychologist and professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. Washington explained that the terminology has evolved over the past six decades, while at its core it’s about creating “workplace environments and systems in our society where everyone has the opportunity to succeed, and everyone has the opportunity to thrive.” 

So why so much recent animosity around it? Why is there such a heavy-handed approach barely two months into the new administration in dismantling DEI programs?  

Dobbin and Washington point to a historical reckoning with unfair hiring practices and treatment of non-whites in the workplace and educational systems, starting with an affirmative action executive order issued by President John F. Kennedy in 1961, which required all federal agencies and firms with federal contracts to take “positive steps to end the history of discrimination in employment.” 

Fast forward to the last five years, and Hottle argued that the reason there has been so much backlash against DEI is that “we haven’t done a good enough job to make everyone understand that [DEI] includes everyone. Yes, people have varying levels of privilege, but it wasn’t meant to discount or diminish the experience of, for instance, a white man who grew up in low socioeconomic status and had his own unique struggle. 

“This failure to acknowledge that everyone has varying levels of privilege and power, and varying levels of challenges stacked against them has led to a lot of misplaced frustration and anger towards DEI,” Hottle said.

 “And, because there’s such a focus on race after 2020, that messaging got lost. People didn’t get to understand the full picture around how DEI is beneficial in so many ways for so many of us.” 

She further explained how there was a legitimate and necessary response to George Floyd’s murder and the continuing violence against Black and Brown communities, prior to, during the summer of 2020, and after. “Of course we had to focus on this. But we then lost everyone else.” 

It’s unfortunate, she said, because in focusing on historically marginalized communities who deserved equity, better treatment, focus, and inclusion, others became much more defensive.  “There’s a better way to approach this defensiveness when you talk to people of privilege,” she said, and that is a focus on empathy in acknowledging their experiences. Admittedly this is hard to do when some communities have borne the brunt of persecution and violence. “There was a lot of anger and a lot of uproar, and rightfully,” Hottle said. “But it didn’t land in a way that was most productive.” 

So, is DEI going away? Will it be known by a different name? 

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Interfaith America founder, Eboo Patel, made the case for making pluralism central to liberal-arts education. Pluralism in a college setting, as Patel described it, will teach students to “engage with different viewpoints and transform their disagreements into learning experiences.” He made his case for this in Washington, D.C. last April at a convening of higher-education administrators titled “Advancing Campus Pluralism: Bridgebuilding Across Difference.” 

Interfaith America has built a curriculum toolkit, “Bridging the Gap” to help colleges, universities and companies improve their communication strategies for open discussions and foster pluralism by teaching people to be “more effective listeners, become more comfortable in contentious conversations, and use stories to build connections to people from different backgrounds.” 

But can it become a kind of replacement for DEI programs and initiatives across the board?  

Porter Braswell, co-founder and executive chairman of Jopwell, which works for diversity and inclusion in the workforce, is the host of the podcast “Race at Work”. He’s worked in DEI initiatives for more than a decade and says here that what’s certain is that DEI isn’t going away, given our country’s history of legalized slavery, Jim Crow laws, economic racism, housing and land discrimination, conscious and unconscious bias and so much more. 

And simply rebranding DEI by another name “won’t hit at the roots of the issue, nor will they provide a tangible road map for businesses to continue the work they’ve started.” 

“It’s time to reimagine what DEI looks like in America,” said Braswell. And in the workplace, “corporate DEI will only thrive if it evolves from a siloed organizational department into an integrated, cross-functional project. Only then will DEI have the chance to transform organizational cultures, in every department and at every level.” 

Braswell argued that companies with integrated DEI “sensibilities and initiatives … be it in their talent, product, innovation, supplier, leadership, strategy, marketing, or finance teams – will continue to be the most successful, with more diverse companies consistently outperforming less diverse ones by as much as 36% in profitability.” 

 Hottle agreed. She said that DEI isn’t going away, but perhaps it’s going to evolve in naming conventions and the way it’s packaged and integrated in organizations, in some cases. 

“But the substance and the values and the principles and the aims are not going to go away. You do want diversity because it does translate to better performance, less risk, more innovation,” she said, citing data from McKinsey and Company’s reports on diversity and inclusion.

“But how do we ensure that we do that fairly? It’s about performance. It’s about profitability, it’s about innovation,” Hottle said. “I think the change that is needed is the way we talk about it and the way that we, as DEI practitioners and people leaders, approach it with everyone in organizations, and how we understand it. Everybody must play a part. It’s not to say that a lot of leaders are not doing this already, but because of rhetoric from the current administration, [the marketable, profitable, and fundamentally human] benefits of DEI are getting lost.”