What’s Missing in the Diversity and Inclusion Conversation
I’ve been a (sometimes reluctant) Diversity, Equity and inclusion (DEI) professional for more than twenty years now and I think we’ve lost the thread.
I was professionally initiated with the well-known consultancy, Catalyst, and embedded in companies like Nike, Microsoft and PwC. I’ve led teams at Starbucks, McKesson and REI Co-op. Even as I migrated my career to marketing and social impact strategy more broadly, DEI work followed me. I’ve coached executives, acted as therapist to employees and channeled Olivia Pope to clean up company messes on more than one occasion. That’s all to say my point of view has been hard earned.
In my time in the field, I’ve long known there’s something missing in the conversation. This longing shows itself in the evolution of how we’ve named the work and the organizational functions that fight for it: Diversity →Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) →Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) →Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, Justice (DEIJ) →and, most recently, Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging (DIB).
Though we’re clearly getting warmer, I do not believe that inclusion, equity, justice, or even belonging are the values that complete the diversity conversation. I believe the missing concept is oneness. As Sufi teacher and author Llewellyn Vaughn-Lee states, “Oneness is very simple: everything is included and allowed to live according to its true nature.”
Oneness does not mean we are all the same, but it does affirm the truth that we are all inextricably tied. It follows then, that what happens to one, happens to the whole. And it is oneness that offers diversity its true partner in duality.
We intuitively understand duality: joy and pain, love and hate, left and right, masculine and feminine. Between these polarities exists the continuum of experiences of those two things and their innate dependence on each other for definition. Diversity and oneness need each other to fully define themselves.
In his article, Polarities and Paradox, Ash Buchanan writes:
In Chinese philosophy, the yin yang symbol is the symbol of embracing polarities. It describes how opposites can be complementary, interconnected and interdependent. The philosophy suggests opposites may give rise to each other, that they are two sides of the same thing.
I am suggesting here that oneness is diversity’s polarity and in absence of its clear articulation, we have struggled to get at the root of the work. It is understandable that companies and organizations would be drawn to territories like belonging as a deeper expression of the popular “bring your whole self to work” mantra (which I have a massive side-eye on).
But for all their merits — and their respective necessity — inclusion, belonging, justice and equity are not the yin to diversity’s yang. They are values between the polarities of diversity and oneness; attempts to recognize the understood truth that in oneness, everything has a place. Therefore, sexism, racism, homophobia or other weaponization of difference are an affront to our deep knowing that everything is one. Oneness explains why we care.
It would have been blasphemous to talk about oneness so openly before the COVID-19 pandemic. But all bets are off now. Oneness has entered daily discourse with a confidence that is striking. It’s like the phenomena when you buy a car and suddenly see it everywhere. Tune in and you’ll notice — it’s not just mystics and musicians talking about oneness anymore — even economists, ecologists and social justice activists are taking note:
The meek are getting ready. Behind closed doors, millions of hearts are transforming. Millions of minds are opening. Millions of seeds are germinating. When the doors swing wide … new beings will walk the Earth. Be one. Get ready. — @vanjones68 best-selling author and social activist
Our choices affect everyone around us. There is no such thing as “individual risk” or “individual wellness.” …Owning and embracing our global interconnectedness (from a safe distance) and thinking about others as we make choices is, ironically, our only path to safety for ourselves and the people we love. — @brenebrown research professor, expert on belonging and best-selling author
Oneness is not just making its debut. It is ancient and present in tenets ranging from the First People’s Original Instructions to South Africa’s philosophy of umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu(I am, because you are) to central principle’s in Taoism, Judaism, Islam[1]and Thich Naht Hanh’s contemporary concept of interbeing. Or how about the American motto, E pluribus unum (Out of many, one)?
So why has oneness eluded the evolving conversation on diversity? I’ve narrowed it down to three key obstacles:
- Risk of “diversity bypass” (going around diversity to get to oneness)
- Fear of sounding too woo-woo (can I get an amen?)
- Reticence to invoke a perceived spiritual principle in the workplace
Risk of “diversity bypass”
Bypassing diversity in favor of oneness often sounds like, “I don’t see color.” or “People are just humans. Can’t we all just get along?” It’s a strategy to avoid the complexity inherent in diversity.
These may (or may not) be well-intentioned assertions on the part of the person speaking, but they rarely land with presumption of positive intent. The invocation of common humanity is often weaponized, used as a way to dodge the contemporary and historical inequities that permeate our national and global culture.
People in the diversity field have been fighting against the force that dismiss or penalize difference for as long as the field has existed. It is understandable when we have gone to such great lengths to validate diversity that we would now hesitate to introduce the concept of oneness. It feels risky and maybe too soon. I’d argue that oneness has been present all along, just unspoken.
Oneness is not homogeneity and it does not wash out differences, injustices or inequities. Oneness encompasses everything — it recognizes the beautiful and terrible, acknowledges our interconnectedness as unassailable, and doesn’t turn away from paradox.
Fear of sounding woo-woo
Let’s face it, the endless stream of clip-art crayon boxes, multihued hands clasped in a circle, rainbows and mosaics haven’t helped the professional reputation of diversity practitioners. In response to the industry’s brand crisis, diversity champions have bent over backward to assert that it’s “all about the Benjamins,” becoming adept at the language of the business: no mission without margin, return on investment and the bottom line.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks. Nobody enters this area of work because they are committed to capital for capital’s sake. But I get it. Diversity proponents are trying to protect what little respect they may have earned, and oneness might seem a threat to it all. Or maybe we are in a place where the root of diversity work has been so completely co-opted by capitalism that we’ve lost the thread.
Practices like mindfulness, empathy and belonging are taking hold in companies across the country and demonstrating our ability to hold essential human needs alongside the demands of business. I am confident that if these deep needs can be embraced with the respect warranted them, that oneness stands a chance.
Reticence to invoke spiritual principles in any form in the workplace
Religion is the third-rail in the workplace, sitting kitty corner to its twin, politics. Invoking oneness can’t help but conjure the idea that there is something bigger than the individual — and that something might be spiritual or religious in nature.
While some companies now support employee resource groups (ERGs) across this dimension of diversity, in the day-to-day of most workplaces, we steer clear of conversations of our spiritual and religious beliefs and oneness might invoke the thing we’ve worked so hard to avoid.
However, as with concepts like inclusion or belonging, it is possible to understand oneness in secular terms, thereby offering an antidote to this obstacle. In fact, even some of our most beloved scientists have called forth the notion of oneness.
Quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger believed his research showed, “No self is of itself alone. It has a long chain of intellectual ancestors. The ‘I’ is chained to ancestry by many factors … This is not mere allegory, but an eternal memory.”
And Albert Einstein said, “a human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. . . We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.”
If they can conjure oneness in the name of science, so can we in the name of diversity.
So, what now?
In my decades of work to help organizations, leaders and employees understand diversity, I’ve often been left feeling like I’ve come up short because I was reticent to speak of oneness; afraid I would alienate leaders and allies. But I’ve always had a deep internal knowledge that forces like racism, sexism and homophobia are like self-mutilation; it is only if you think of yourself as separate from others (including the planet) that you would be empowered to act out your darkest impulses of ego, greed and power.
It seems long overdue that we contemplate Einstein’s “substantially new manner of thinking.”
In her book, Reimaging Capitalism in a World On Fire, Harvard Business School Professor Rebecca Henderson wrote, “The roots of our current predicament are fear and separateness.” When asked about this line in a podcast interview, Henderson expanded her point by saying:
“At root I really deeply believe we are not going to solve the problems we face unless we reach out to each other and understand ourselves as part of something much more important. …It’s fundamental.”
And it’s this fundamental, ancient and contemporary recognition of oneness that I believe is the missing concept in the diversity conversation and the seed for the future of work that reconnects us to our shared fate.
So, if you are a professional who is trying to help others glean understanding in this space, a leader seeking to connect to this work or an individual who “gets it” but can’t explain why, then this construct might be helpful to you. Together we can boldly assert that diversity and oneness are polarities that balance and define each other. Oneness holds all difference, all obstacles and all atrocities (those -isms and schisms). It holds our individual identities with equal space for collective identities and it understands that oppression of others is oppression of self. It equally holds all that is beautiful.
Inclusion, equity, justice and belonging are forces seeking to restore our recollection of oneness so that we might live it.
If this moment in time has not given us permission to talk about oneness, I don’t know what will. I do know that organizations will not survive this post-pandemic era without new ways of thinking and operating. The new frontier of commerce must be able to acknowledge and tend to our deep shared humanity and interconnectedness in order to survive. “It’s fundamental.”
As always, I hope you take what you like and leave the rest.
One Love.
*Many thanks to Stacy Milrany for lending me her art, to Aer Parris for their supreme editing insight. It takes a village, afterall.
