The imperative to decolonize diversity, equity & inclusion
By Swaptik Chowdhury, Priya Gandhi, Khadesia Howell, and Rhianna C. Rogers
The Imperative to Decolonize Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The ramifications of an ongoing racialized pandemic have pushed discussions around diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) to the center of public discourse. Not since the 1960s, the last Civil Rights era, has DEI received such sustained interest. Given the recent Biden Administration’s executive order to promote DEI in the federal workforce, many companies have been pushed to create DEI initiatives, programs, and positions to support this work across the United States (U.S.) Given the homogeneity of leadership, many leaders are struggling with ways to address the DEI and the needs of their stakeholders while, at the same time, meeting their profit margins. Adding these conflicting interests to the layer of unresolved traumas, socio-economic disparities, and cultural/racial marginalization of diverse voices, we are left with a conundrum of conflicts, uncertain needs, and conflicting wants across groups. Respondent perspectives from a 2020 McKinsey & Company study remind us that “hiring diverse talent isn’t enough — it’s the workplace experience that shapes whether people remain and thrive.”
With this sudden influx of interest and instability in the field, questions arise like: How do we ensure that DEI as a field of study is moving in the right direction? Who should be in control of this space — the federal government, practitioners, theorists, the people? Where do we go from here?
Given the unregulated entry points currently in this space, many new DEI adopters have found that the pathway for successful framework adoption and implementation is unclear. Inconsistent DEI definitions, lack of universal standards, and conflicting theoretical frameworks and assessments have inhibited DEI’s grounding in public discourse. Some would argue a lack of clarity has allowed for the colonization of DEI or the introduction of external systemic/factors acting on the field to hinder its theoretical formation and methodological progress (e.g., when policy doesn’t connect to racialized data). Though 2020 has seen a rise in DEI practitioners, many long-standing DEI experts are asking: Has this space really changed, or are power dynamics manifesting themselves in new ways? We have coined this process as the recolonization of DEI, or the imbalanced power/control applied to DEI spaces by non-experts (or members of a theoretically/methodologically uninformed group). Non-experts use personal experiences rather than DEI disciplinary theory and methods to construct work in this space. We argue that the colonization and recolonization of DEI efforts have watered down the field to make these topics more “palatable to the masses.” Ultimately the result is more performative approaches than transformational change across industries.
Case in point, in 1972, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of the Civil Rights Act (1964) was enacted. Over time, related practices, such as diversity training to reduce implicit biases and microaggressions in the workplace and grievance redress protocols, became popular DEI policies. Despite their sustained popularity, these policies have not effectively improved DEI in the workplace. The sustained use of ineffective policies is an example of the recolonization of DEI, where public posturing is a substitute for systematic evaluation and change. Even now, we continue to see the rampant and harmful tokenization of individuals with diverse attributes across organizations. On a positive note, there is some evidence of changing practices around DEI: a 2020 survey of North American Organizational leaders by Harvard Business Review Analytic reported that 73% of the respondents are extending accountability beyond Human Resources by involving managers and leaders in the implementation of DEI strategies. That said, there is still much to do in this space.
Decolonizing DEI requires us to understand and dismantle the historical, political, and economic forces that entrench the status quo (i.e., colonization and decolonization practices in DEI) and create opportunities for real systematic and transformative change. Decolonizing DEI further requires experts and practitioners in this space to dismantle the uninformed myths intentionally and consciously in the field and recenter data at the core of the current paradigm/framework development.
We believe it is time for an innovative community of practitioners to emerge in DEI that can jointly frame this field from within it. Far too often, DEI is controlled by external forces. While we still collectively are amid a new civil rights era, it is time for DEI experts to organize to ensure we sustain this field and truly decolonize DEI. Therefore, there is a need for an inclusive association that will allow “policymakers, community leaders, researchers, and practitioners to work together to make joint, nonpartisan decisions that look at diverse perspectives and give space to historically underrepresented voices.” [1]
[1] Rogers, R. & Hannahs, L.B. (2022). National Association for DEI — Working Group [Unpublished manuscript]. Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy, The RAND Corporation.
Key Definitions adapted by the RAND Center for Advancing Racial Equity Policy:
Diversity “refers to all aspects of human difference, social identities, and social group differences, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, creed, color, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual identity, socio-economic status, language, culture, national origin, religion/spirituality, age, disability, and military/veteran status, political perspective, and associational preferences”
Equity is the “just and fair inclusion into a society in which all can participate, prosper, and reach their full potential.”
Inclusion refers to the “intentional, ongoing effort to ensure that diverse people with different identities are able to fully participate in all aspects of the work of an organization…It refers to the way that diverse individuals are valued as respected members and are welcomed in an organization and/or community.”
Other Definitions:
Colonization is the “act or practice of appropriating something that one does not own or have a right to”. (Merriam-Webster, 2022)
Recolonization is “colonization of a previously colonized region or habitat again”. (Merriam-Webster, 2022)
Decolonization is “to free from the dominating influence of a colonizing power”. (Merriam-Webster, 2022)
About the Authors
Swaptik Chowdhury: Swaptik Chowdhury is a Ph.D. student in the Technology Applications and Implications stream at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy researcher at RAND Corporation. He has an MS in Structural Engineering from Arizona State University. His research interests include diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) studies, science and technology policy, climate change adaptation and mitigation, and misinformation and disinformation studies.
Priya Gandhi: Priya Samir Gandhi (she/her) is a Ph.D. candidate in the Community-Partnered Policy and Action stream at the Pardee RAND Graduate School and an assistant policy researcher at the RAND Corporation. Her research interests include health and racial equity, the social determinants of health, health care access and quality, public health preparedness, and community resilience. Before joining Pardee RAND, she was a research associate at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation in its Research, Evaluation, and Learning unit. She has an M.S. in health care policy and management, a B.S. in policy and management from Carnegie Mellon University, and a training certificate in public health from Johns Hopkins University.
Khadesia Howell: Khadesia Howell is an assistant policy researcher at RAND and a Ph.D. student at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. She obtained her MPH from Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University and BA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Before joining Pardee RAND, she was the Policy and Legislative Coordinator in the Florida Department of Health’s Disease Control and Health Protection division. She also did program evaluation, quality improvement, and performance management. Previous research dealt with medical marijuana policy implementation and equity, vaccine equity regarding race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status, and crime-free housing policies. She recently received a pilot grant award from the Center for HIV Identification, Prevention, and Treatment Services to research the impact of discrimination from an intersectional lens.
Rhianna C. Rogers: Rhianna C. Rogers, Ph.D., is the director of the RAND Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy (CAREP). Dr. Rhianna C. Rogers is the inaugural Director of the Center to Advance Racial Equity Policy at the RAND Corporation. Before RAND, Rogers held administrative/teaching appointments in Higher Education and Tribal government (2002–2021).
Rogers is an expert on cultural and ethnic studies, intercultural competencies and diversity education, cultural mediation, and virtual exchange programmatic development and implementation. Dr. Rogers has successfully built and implemented DEI programming for over a decade in higher education, at private/public corporations, and within NGOs. For eleven years, Dr. Rogers created and ran the SUNY Empire State College-supported Buffalo Project, a longitudinal participatory action research project focused on the use of cultural data as the baseline for programmatic development and implementation. Dr. Rogers is a co-founder of Sustainable Progress and Equality Collective (SPEC).
Dr. Rogers was the Ernest Boyer Presidential Fellow at the Rockefeller Institute of Government and led the Center for Law and Policy Solutions (CLPS) Fellowship program (2019–2020), a Stevens Initiative Visiting Professor of Anthropology at the American University of Technology in Kaslik, Lebanon (2017–2018), and served two terms as the SUNY Empire State College Coordinator of Interdisciplinary and Multidisciplinary Studies (2017–2019 and 2014–2017).
Dr. Rogers received a certificate in Ethnic Studies, a B.A. in Social Sciences (Anthropology Major and History Minor), an M.A. in History, and a Ph.D. in Comparative Studies (Anthropology, History, and Linguistics Concentrations) from Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida.
