KQED's Approach to DEI Challenges in America's Evolving Political Landscape

The murder of George Floyd four years ago sparked a racial awakening for some Americans.

Four years later, the momentum to address systemic racism, demanded by the people who marched in protest against police violence, has evaporated. Initiatives to create more inclusive organizations are being canceled.

“The business community, long averse to political risks or controversies, backed away from DEI programs over the past two years in the wake of widespread attacks from lawmakers, high-profile rich guys and conservative activists like former Trump aide Stephen Miller,” Axios reported in April.

“It’s an attack on equity,” Eric Abrams, KQED’s chief diversity, equity and inclusion officer, told me.

It was only a matter of time.

It was only a few years ago that conservatives attacked Critical Race Theory, the academic framework that recognizes racism is embedded in institutions, laws and policies, impacting everything from health care to education to employment opportunities. The theory is that racism is more than individual bias and prejudice.

In June 2023, the conservative U.S. Supreme Court effectively ended race-conscious admission programs at colleges and universities.

Diversity, equity and inclusion — DEI — was on my mind on Juneteenth, a day that commemorates the emancipation of enslaved people in Texas more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation, an executive order that freed Black people, went into effect. DEI has been around for decades with origins in the civil rights movement. In the 1960s and 1970s, many companies began deploying diversity training until the practice cooled during President Ronald Reagan’s administration.

After Floyd’s death, there was a renewed demand for policies to address the exclusion of historically marginalized groups. When done appropriately, DEI includes hiring practices, pay inequity, poor retention rates among marginalized groups and anti-discrimination training, among other things. The backlash of the brief era has been swift.

DEI initiatives have been bombarded on college campuses, corporate boardrooms and state legislatures. In an effort to suppress history, books focused on the experiences of non-white people have been banned. Rich, powerful men have claimed that DEI is “another word for racism” and “inherently a racist and illegal movement.” A politician, whose wealth is in question because of mounting legal debts, has vowed to end anti-white racism. To hear the privileged talk, DEI is worse than the N-word.

Is DEI bound for the garbage at KQED, an organization intentionally focused on public service? Earlier this week, I sat down with Abrams and Candace Rucker, KQED’s DEI program manager, to begin a conversation about the challenges of their work — and what the DEI backlash means for KQED.

Charlamagne tha God, a Black radio and TV host, pilloried DEI initiatives as a PR stunt on The Daily Show. Naturally, his appearance was celebrated on Fox News.

“I was talking about corporate DEI initiatives that were created after George Floyd that were more symbolism over substance,” he told The New York Times last month. “I’m talking about the corporations who do things like putting a Simone Biles poster in the break room and saying something like, ‘We’re head over heels for diversity here.’ I’m not talking about DEI over all, and it’s so interesting to me because I love what the right-wing media does.”

Abrams chuckled when I mentioned the episode.

“When we talk about performative corporate DEI initiatives, there’s a lot of this stuff that is, I think, inherently performative,” he said. “But there’s nothing performative about talking to journalists about their internal unconscious bias. There’s nothing performative about talking to our other colleagues or our HR team on how we can improve our hiring processes.”

How did inclusivity become a wedge in America?

“I feel like the picture that DEI gets is that it’s anti-white and it’s only for marginalized groups or racially-minoritized people. It’s not, though,” Rucker said. “That’s one of the flaws of the DEI industry. When it was getting started and when it started gaining traction, we did not market it correctly. We are all for the marginalized groups and racially-minoritized people, which we should be, but we left out everybody else.”

According to a 2023 report by Pew Research Center, about two-thirds or more of Black, Asian and Hispanic workers say that focusing on DEI at work is a good thing. Less than half of white workers, roughly 47%, feel the same. The gap widens when broken down generationally.

In 2023, NBC reported DEI roles increased by 55% after Floyd’s murder. The roles have disappeared, signaling that efforts to make companies more inclusive weren’t supported by the companies. Maybe it’s because the rapid DEI expansion didn’t invite what people perceive as the opposite of DEI — cisgender, heterosexual white men — to the table.

To learn.

“If we don’t include him in the conversation, how the hell is he going to be a good ally?” Rucker said. “How is he going to know what he can do to support everybody else — to unlearn the things that he’s previously learned and relearn from different perspectives? He’s not going to know how to do that if we don’t include him in the conversation.”

Abrams said: “Ultimately, what we’d like to create here is space where we can have these difficult conversations in a civil, non-attacking, ‘Yeah, you disagree with me on this issue, but let’s go to lunch [anyway]’ versus, ‘You disagree with me on this issue, you’re evil, we can never speak again’.”

I will continue having periodic conversations with Abrams and Rucker, because I believe in diversity, equity and inclusion — mixed with a healthy dose of curiosity.

“We are focused on making things equitable for everybody,” Rucker told me. “We’re focused on people — all of the people. Including everybody in the conversation and fostering that curiosity. If you constantly talk about curiosity and practice it in front of people, people are going to catch on.”

That would be epic.