After the killing of George Floyd in 2020, millions of Americans participated in protests for racial justice. Much of corporate America promised to address racial equity. Now, many of those companies are retreating from diversity initiatives.
“Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work” identifies how to create a more equitable workplace. Through research and anecdotes, Portland author Shari Dunn illustrates the institutional racism that exists in the workplace and how to stop it.
Shari Dunn is the author of “Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work.”
Jason Hill
We learn more from Dunn about race in the workplace, the backlash against diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and how she says businesses should rethink employment.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, millions of Americans took part in protests for racial justice. And a lot of corporate America promised to address racial equity. Now, many of those companies seem to be retreating from their diversity initiatives. That follows a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023 that struck down race conscious admissions and a second Trump administration that has been hostile to DEI in the public and private sectors.
Shari Dunn says we are going in the wrong direction and witnessing what amounts to the end of the second era of Reconstruction in this country. Dunn previously worked as a lawyer, a CEO and a television news anchor. She is now the founder of a consulting firm focused on diversity and equity. Her new book is called “Qualified: How Competency Checking and Race Collide at Work.”
It’s great to have you on Think Out Loud.
Shari Dunn: Great to be here.
Miller: You started writing this book well before Donald Trump won reelection. What had you been seeing or hearing from your clients or other people that made you say there’s a book here for me to write?
Dunn: It’s funny. People often ask me, did I have a crystal ball, where we were going. But actually, it was my interactions with clients, specifically in consulting, where I was hearing the same stories. Now, I know, as a Black person in the workplace, that certain things happen to me. I’ve heard people say it’s happened to them. But I thought, “Wait a minute, something is going on here and it’s a problem. Let me dig deeper.” So it was the stories I was hearing from my clients about the ways in which they were being blocked once they got a job, how hard it was to advance and keep a job. Then I thought, “OK, what is this about?” So that led me. In the book I say Black women were the canaries in the workplace coal mine, because they were the first group that really started alerting that something was wrong.
Miller: Could you just give us one story? It seems like there were many of them … but that helped crystallize this for you?
Dunn: Sure. I’ve talked to people from the government, to the arts, to nonprofits – and I’ll make an amalgam of stories – but really it was this thing of, “Hey, I’m being called hostile. I’m being told I have a tone problem. I have all my degrees and things in place, but I’m not getting advancement and then people are being mean to me.” So I was like, “OK, that’s interesting.” Then I would speak to someone who worked in a different industry and they would tell me the same language.
Actually, one of the people I spoke with – I interviewed a lot of people for the book – was a Black man who’s running a college. He was telling me the story of how there was some hesitancy in hiring him. He got the job. They needed him to raise X amount of dollars. He raised the money and then was told, “Where did you get that money? Is it real money? Are you sure they’re going to come through with the money?” I mean, he was just like, “Wait, I was given a job. And then when I did the job, I was questioned about whether I really did the job.” He ended up having to leave the position. And his story isn’t the only story like that, where people were saying, “Wait, wait, I’m doing the job. And now people seem mad that I’m doing the job.”
Miller: Do I remember correctly for his story, after all of that, that college ended up continuing some of the programs that he had started after pushing him out?
Dunn: Yeah, exactly.
Miller: They were happy enough with the results that they kept those things going.
Dunn: Yeah, but his presence, his authority, specifically the anti-Blackness that comes up – the exercise of Black authority seems to be a triggering point for a lot of people in professional spaces, where this ends up exploding.
Miller: So I want to go back in history because your book actually does that in great detail. You’ve said, as I noted at the beginning, that we’re living in the end of a second period of Reconstruction. That’s one of your central historical analogies. And it’s worth, first, talking about Reconstruction with a capital R, and what happened that derailed and prevented it from accomplishing most of its aims, in a lasting way, in the 19th century. Can you remind us of a short-ish version of that history?
Dunn: Well, it’s funny. I was just on a webinar today with folks from the UK, talking about DEI in the UK and the United States, and I gave them a primer on Reconstruction.
Miller: Was it fair to say that Americans need as much of a primer as British people?
Dunn: Oh, [it’s] everybody. It’s the one piece that we don’t know a lot about. And yet, what happened to end Reconstruction is the reason I’m sitting here today having this conversation.
So at the end of slavery, there was a period of time called Reconstruction, obviously, trying to reconstruct the North and the South. But the North brings in troops to enforce rules and regulations around general reconstruction of the country, but specifically, to make sure that, as it regards the formerly enslaved – now free Black folks – that they have the ability to get a job, not be reenslaved and that they have support. This, I believe, kicks off our hostility toward the federal government’s intervention and states’ rights. But the federal government comes in and says, “No.”
For about 10 to 12 years, after the end of slavery, we have this period called Reconstruction. And during that period, Black folks in the South and around the country really flourished. Now, there were millions of formerly enslaved people who were struggling, but there was a huge Black flourishing. So we have Black doctors, Black lawyers, we have the majority of Black legislature in South Carolina. We have our first Black senator. We don’t have back-of-the-bus, we don’t have Black drinking fountains. There were actually multiracial neighborhoods.
There’s two women who died a long time ago, the Delany sisters, who did a play called “Having our Say.” They actually grew up during part of Reconstruction and they saw the switch from Reconstruction to Jim Crow. And they talk about it being just confusing. In a lot of ways, people during Reconstruction lived, in some sense, like we do today. What happened was that the North withdrew and there was this huge backlash to that advancement. And as a result of that backlash, we bring in Jim Crow, which is separate but equal.
But there’s a school [of thought] called the Dunning School that says Reconstruction didn’t work because of “unqualified” Black people in positions of authority during Reconstruction.
Miller: People can’t see the air quotes, as you’re saying all those words, but I did.
Dunn: “Unqualified,” yes. But what you actually see is language during Reconstruction that matches up to language today. For example, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Andrew Johnson first vetoed it in 1865. He literally makes the first reverse discrimination claim. He said that the Civil Rights Act of 1866 – which he vetoed and was overridden – would give Black folks more opportunity and advancement than ever was given to white people.
Now remember, we’re talking about people who just came out of slavery, who don’t have clothes or shoes. And any attempt to set that right was so offensive that it would be reverse discrimination against white people. So you see the first reverse discrimination, you see similar language, you see a lot of scary similarities.
Miller: So if we’re now living in the period of the end of the second era of Reconstruction. When did this era start?
Dunn: You know, this is very interesting because there’s a book that says Barack Obama’s presidency was the third Reconstruction, I think they call it. But what I would say is that the second Reconstruction begins during the Civil Rights era. It reaches the apex at Obama’s presidency and it starts to tilt down where we’re heading to today. That’s the way I look at it.
Miller: What do you see as the evidence that this is ending, that the regression … And I mentioned part of it shortly in my intro, but I’d love to hear it in your words.
Dunn: There is the reframing of the narrative, which also happened at the end of Reconstruction actually. There’s a reframing of the narrative that any program designed to account for inequity is, itself, inequitable. Anything that’s designed to address issues of unfairness is, itself, unfair. And then we see the political shift. And just like with Jim Crow, Jim Crow starts. You have the Black codes, but then the Supreme Court makes Jim Crow legal.
Well, you see the Trump administration basically trying to shift the law and trying to use the courts to cut off access. They’re saying that’s under fairness. But the redress for the unfairness isn’t complete. So you see the language shifting, you see policy shifting and people are literally afraid to speak. I have had people say to me, “You’re so brave for what you’re saying. I couldn’t say that” or, “I can’t really say much about this.” How quickly that has happened.
Miller: And just to be clear, you’re talking about the private sector. You’re not talking about somebody in National Park Service, whose boss’s boss’s boss said, “you can’t do this?”
Dunn: That’s right. I’m talking about people who shouldn’t have that fear. The fear is spreading so quickly.
Miller: I want to hear more about the legal and administrative side of this. But to stick with the way it sort of boiled down for a little bit, you write in the book that one of the things you most enjoy in your work as a consultant is coaching individuals and teams on DEI. That allows you to listen to people’s concerns and questions in a space, you say, “where they can be heard and not judged.”
What are the concerns about DEI, specifically from white people, that you often hear these days?
Dunn: Yeah, I think because none of us, like we were just talking about Reconstruction, really fully understands our historical story, how we get here and how history isn’t in the past, it’s the present, for many people, it’s a confusion about fairness. Is this fair?
Miller: Why is this person getting this thing that I never got?
Dunn: Right, right. Or is it unfair to recognize the unfairness? I mean, it’s a little bit of a trick of the language. But people are confused about that and people have historical stories. I talk about that in the book. It’s actually not the first time somebody has told me this, that their grandparents or whatever had told them that Black people had “different colored blood.” I’ve actually heard that before. People have a lot of historical racial trauma in them that they don’t even know.
So there’s a lot of confusion, because people saw a Black president and thought racism was over – which is wild, but they thought that. Or people saw “The Cosby Show” and they thought, “Oh, all Black people live in brownstones in New York.” So there’s a kind of a simplisticness in how we approach society.
Miller: Or that if Dr. Huxtable could be a doctor or Barack Obama could be a president – not that everyone lives that, but their success shows that it’s possible and that we’ve arrived.
Dunn: Yeah. There is, according to researchers who I cite in the book, an illusion of progress in the United States. And that’s part of the problem. We cover up the fact that it would take one to three centuries for Black people to reach economic parity today with white Americans. And we cover up the reasons for that. I call it the hidden hand. And because of that, there is an unfortunate illusion of progress. It’s not to say that no progress has been made. But when you really dig down, you find out that the progress is like this. But the historical resonance of the problem is like this, much larger, much bigger. So that’s part of the problem, the illusion of progress.
It goes back to, I talk about in the book, how there’s an illusion of more Black people in spaces than there are. There’s research showing that if people see four Black faces, they think it’s 50 – “Oh, my work is totally diverse.” And there’s literally four Black people there.
Miller: Do you mind telling us a story about a conversation you had in your church recently?
Dunn: Yes, yes. This was a while ago. But at my church, I talk about in the book when I talk about that research, someone at the church said, “Our church is more diverse. It’s not like the church is out in Lake Oswego,” or wherever.
Miller: If I may interrupt because I don’t think that you mentioned the race of this person in the book?
Dunn: The person is white.
Miller: I made that assumption, but it’s actually good to not assume.
Dunn: Yes.
Miller: OK, so a white person says to you that here, this is a “diverse church”
Dunn: Yeah, “Our church is so diverse, more diverse.” There are literally five Black people out of hundreds of people. But there’s research showing that that happens. They did research showing faces to white people and when they would ask them what percentage were Black, they would wildly overestimate the number of percentages. Well, this adds to the illusion of advancement because there are two Black people at your job and you think all Black people have jobs.
Miller: Maybe this is an oversimplification of the last 60 years of history. But if the basic argument of the pushback that we’re seeing now is a response to the success of Barack Obama as president and of small gains – as a result of various legal and societal efforts – I’m wondering if you think that any kind of a different packaging or tool set that looks slightly different from what we’ve come to see as DEI in the last half decade or so, if that would have led to a different backlash? Or you think, we call it DEI now, this a current acronym, but any backlash would have followed?
Dunn: I don’t think that. I know some people make this argument. There are people out there advancing different paradigms. If you change language, you could call it “Christmas Day” and people would say Christmas Day is bad. And I say that because when you look at the Freedmen’s Bureau, [it] was designed to help the formerly enslaved, for example, learn to read, but it also helped poor White people learn to read. The Freedmen’s Bureau was attacked just like DEI.
So now we call it the Civil Rights Act of 1866. That was attacked just like the Freedmen’s Bureau. So now we call it civil rights. Civil rights was attacked. Now we call it affirmative action. Affirmative action, people aren’t qualified. They don’t have merit. None of this is true. But you can see the iteration. So what is the through line? The through line is the persistence of anti-Black bias.
So with the result of, whatever you call it, is to have a more inclusive, diverse society, specifically removing the vestiges of anti-Black bias, I don’t care what you call it. People are going to backlash against it. So maybe it’s knowing that which might be more helpful than trying to run with different language.
Miller: I want to turn to some of the specific mechanisms you point to that prevent People of Color, but particularly Black people, from being either hired in the first place or advancing and thriving if they are hired. Collectively, your term for this – and it’s in the subtitle of the book – is “competency checking.” You outline a couple different categories of this. The first is the assumption of Black intellectual inferiority. How might that manifest itself in a workplace or in a hiring?
Dunn: It’s requiring more confirmation in ways that other people aren’t asked – “What school did you go to? What exactly do you know? How do you know that? Can you show me your math? Can you show me how you got to that?” I tell the story of a recruiter who was recruiting for a position. And she had a young woman of color and a white man. And what she found was that the client asked for more interviews from the woman of color. They didn’t ask for more interviews. They wanted more confirmation: “Can you get more references?” So it’s this, “I’m assuming you don’t have it, so I have to check you more and check you more thoroughly.”
Miller: A second method of competence checking that you outline is an expression of surprise or unease in response to open displays of Black intelligence. What’s a story that you’ve heard from a client that illustrates that?
Dunn: Well, I can just tell you a story I’ve heard from myself, which goes back to “you’re so well spoken,” right? “Oh, you’re so well spoken” – yeah, I have a law degree, I was a news anchor. If I wasn’t well spoken, there’d be a problem. That would be something you could comment on. And the reason why that is a problem? Because I tell people it’s like it sounds like a talking dog analogy. “I didn’t know dogs could talk.” It is under the assumption that generally you cannot speak. “How amazing, you can speak!”
So it’s that surprise or shock, or, “you went to that school?” or, “you have this information?” or, “how do you know that?” I mentioned that kind of, “how do you know that?” not “I didn’t know that.” But how could someone like you know something I don’t know. Like that’s impossible. So it’s that kind of dynamic.
Miller: The third broad category that you outline is what you describe as an “autoimmune level rejection of Black leadership.” And some of the examples you point to involve medical emergencies on airplanes. What happened?
Dunn: So there are two incidents where Black women, who are doctors, were on planes – several years apart. And someone got sick and they said, “Oh, is there a doctor on the plane?” In both instances, Black women [responded] and they were questioned, “Are you really a doctor? Do you have your medical license on you? What type of doctor are you?” And it’s like, wait, what? There was nothing I could find where any white person who said they were a doctor was questioned like this. And the two incidents were on the same airline and the airline had actually changed the policy. And the question is how does a flight attendant know if this is really a medical license? I could just make up something, right?
Miller: How are they competent or qualified to assess the competency of their passenger to help the ailing passenger?
Dunn: Yeah, one lady was told, “Put your hand down. We’re looking for a real doctor.” I mean, that is the type of thing that is like, “You couldn’t possibly have the knowledge or authority.”
Miller: Now, to be clear, you’re not arguing that it’s a problem for any given person’s competency or qualifications to be assessed for any particular job. It’s that those assessments should not be done in racially-biased, uneven ways. Is that a fair way to put it?
Dunn: I think it’s more that Black people have to meet a standard. And then People of Color generally, and women, have to meet a standard that is higher. So if you’re assessing my competency equal to somebody else, fine. But if now I have to have three more interviews, five more references, 10 more writing samples or whatever, then this is not assessment. This is competency checking. You’re trying to verify, so that’s the problem. It’s not about saying no one should be checked for their skills. I’m saying that people are having different standards.
Miller: You write that the mindset of an employer should be “to remove hidden blockages that are preventing the natural flow of diverse people from entering, succeeding and staying in this workplace.” I feel like some of the examples you just mentioned seem maybe more obvious than hidden blockages, although who knows what’s hidden and what’s not, I suppose, in an opaque hiring process. Certainly the person who’s being hired can’t say for sure sometimes that they know if their competitors who are going for the job have been asked for three extra interviews.
But if you’re on the employer’s side, what would you want that employer to be self-interrogating, in terms of hidden blockages?
Dunn: Well, there’s a couple of things. Who succeeds here and who doesn’t? You can look at your data. Who’s constantly leaving and who stays? Who can make a mistake and who can’t? Who gets punished more severely or “you’re out the door,” and who can make a mistake and it doesn’t seem to impact them? You can figure that out. That’s not hard to figure out. Who do you have here, based on their profile, who’s artificially depressed?
So I talk about, in the book, that Bureau of Labor Statistics data – which still exists on the website – interpreted by the Economic Policy Institute, showed that Black people actually come to jobs with more experience and more skill than white people. Meaning that, frequently, they have more education, more experience. But they get in positions that are not commensurate. So they’re in a job where you need a high school diploma and they have an undergraduate degree. They’re in a job where you need an undergraduate degree. They have a master’s or a PhD. So the idea that there aren’t qualified people is not true. So look in your space and say, “Wait a minute. Mary has been here 10 years and she’s got a master’s degree. How come John, who showed up yesterday with a BA, or got a master’s while he’s here, is now a VP?” You can ask yourself these questions, and they are evident questions to ask.
Then there is the, I call it, the secret hiring pipeline, the referral-based hiring, which is 90-plus percent white. This has to do with housing patterns, housing discrimination. It actually doesn’t mean that referral-based hiring is meant to be that way. But it is a historical vestige of how we hired in this country
Miller: Of existing social networks, where people who are in power already are more likely to be white.
Dunn: Yeah. And it’s always been that way. If you think about the United States, we didn’t do open hiring probably until like the ‘40s. In the 1800s, how did we hire? It’s a letter from my friend, please let them be an apprentice or this is a relationship. We mainly did that type of hiring. We only started really having more open hiring probably during World War I and then it definitely accelerated in World War II, after the GI Bill and we got all these ethnic white folks into the more professional stratas of hiring. And now we start to have a process and we have requirements. So it’s a vestige of a time of exclusion, referral-based hiring and because of housing patterns it primarily benefits white people. It is a closed hiring system. It’s kind of like legacy admissions in universities.
So if you really want to remove these … if you assume you don’t have Black people because they’re so unqualified and you’ve got to have special things, you’re gonna have bad solutions. If you understand, “wait a minute, I have a bunch of artificial blockages and I need to remove those,” then you’re gonna have different solutions.
Miller: One of your projects is to either basically get rid of the term “imposter syndrome” or to make it much, much less common. My guess is that most people listening to us are basically familiar with it. But what’s a short version of what “imposter syndrome” is?
Dunn: Imposter syndrome says that you have these negative self-doubt feelings. And because of your self-doubt, you’re sabotaging yourself. You don’t feel like you belong.
Miller: You do belong, but you don’t feel like it? That’s a problem.
Dunn: Yeah. You don’t feel like it and it’s something that you internally need to work through to get over.
Miller: OK, what’s wrong with this and why is it a problem that people have called it an epidemic?
Dunn: It’s a misidentification. It’s a misidentification. If you misidentify the illness, you’re gonna have the wrong medication. And I talk about imposter syndrome like a “Scooby Doo” character villain that you uncover and it’s something else. So the problem with imposter syndrome is the original research originates from I think 1973 to ‘78, so a five-year study. It’s a very small study about 140 middle to upper class white women.
Some highlights or lowlights of that study is the study does not contextualize the time in which the women live. In other words, those women were the first vanguard into professional spaces. Women got a right to have a bank account during that time. I mean, these women were really up against it. And instead of the research looking at the impact of the system on women’s feelings, it seemed to have … I always say, “Is the call coming from inside the house or outside the house?” And they said the call was coming from inside the house. That is, these women’s sense of perfection was causing them problems. It doesn’t talk about how patriarchy and white supremacy impose perfectionism on white women.
So imposter syndrome has been like a virus let loose on the world where everybody talks about it. The problem I see is that it is misidentified as the impact of competency checking. In other words, white women came into the workforce in the ‘70s. They are made to act like little men. They are sexually harassed. Martha Stewart tells some wild stories in her documentary about the things she endured. And then they are blamed for their insecurity. If I come into a room, and nobody looks like me and nobody is like me, I’m gonna feel insecure. I do not have a syndrome.
I feel uncomfortable.
Now, I’m not saying that people don’t feel unsure or uncertain. I’m saying that calling it a “syndrome” pathologizes women particularly. And it misidentifies how I need to address it. If I think the problem is internal, then I just need to self-talk. If I realize the problem is systemic, I need to change the system. If I come to work and I feel like an impostor because nobody looks like me, we need to figure out how we get more people who look like me. If I’m the only one who’s caring for children and I feel like I can’t talk about the fact that I have kids, this is not because you have a syndrome. This is because this is a hostile place and difficult for you to work.
This makes it difficult because most Black women I talk to do not like the term impostor syndrome. They do not feel they are imposters. They are certain they know what they’re doing. What they feel is causing the problem is racism and sexism. So Black women tend to identify specific things, whereas the problem with imposter syndrome, it has diverted a lot of white women down the road that this is some problem they have. And now it’s metastasized out. Everybody’s got imposter syndrome – children, men, everybody’s got imposter syndrome. And it’s like hysteria. Women didn’t have hysteria. This is public radio, we won’t talk about what was really going on, but they did not have hysteria.
So it is problematic because it prevents coalitions. I tell the story about “Norma Rae,” the movie, or Crystal Sutton. She said, “I have a problem in this workplace” – they worked in a textile plant in the South in the ‘70s – “around sexism, racism, and payment.” And, “I’m gonna work, I’m gonna build a cross racial relationship with Black women,” which was not done in the South at that time. “We’re going to unionize this plant and we’re going to have a better work environment.” That is the diverging roads when you put things under imposter syndrome.
Miller: You also write a fair amount about the importance of communication styles and our assumptions about how … we could say workplace communication because a lot of the book is about workplace. But maybe in some of these things [communication] could be much broader, could be more at a societal level, and the importance of how communication works or where it breaks down. What do you see as some common pitfalls?
Dunn: I am a communication evangelist. I think that so much of our problems have to do with miscommunication. And I think most corporations do a huge disservice because they spend money on DiSC type and Myers-Briggs, and these are not our problems. Our problems are that we don’t communicate well across gender, across race, across ethnicity, across income. And we really break down on interpretation. We are missing contextual interpretation with each other, because I don’t know your shorthand. I’m not a tall, white guy from wherever you’re from. I don’t know your shorthand. You don’t know my shorthand. And because of that we’re misfiring frequently, in our communication. That misfire ends up becoming a huge thing.
Frequently, I think, the source of many issues around racial discrimination and gender discrimination is a misfire around how we are understanding what the other person means. And I tell the story in the book about coaching a woman who was working with a young Hispanic man. And he kept saying, “I know … ”
Miller: She was training him. He would say that and she was getting annoyed?
Dunn: Very annoyed. And she was thinking he wasn’t listening. So the company had me talk to her and I asked her some questions. I said, well, just tell me a little bit about him. What’s his background? “Well, he’s Latinx Hispanic.” Is English his first language? “No, no.” And I’m like, OK, that’s interesting. That’s interesting to me. And I said that I don’t know this for sure because that would be stereotyping, but I think we might ask a question, could this be a misinterpretation?
I said, “why don’t you ask him,” it hadn’t occurred to ask him, “is he affirming what you’re telling him or is he telling you he already knows the thing?” Had not occurred to her, because “I know” it’s so triggering in English. When somebody says, “I know,” we hear a lot of sass in English. Well, if you’re not a native English speaker, you might not know that. You might not know you are really annoying somebody.
Miller: My 9-year-old has an unbelievably annoying way of saying “I know” to everything I say.
[Laughter]
Dunn: So you see what I’m saying? It’s this type of miscommunication that is really something we need to dig into in the workplace.
Miller: I want to go back to the legal and administrative side of this, where we started. In 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that race-based admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment and also part of the Civil Rights Act. Can you give us a short version of the chief justice’s majority opinion there?
Dunn: There are elements of this court that remind me of the court that brought in Jim Crow. And I talk about, in the book, the chief justice’s shocking misinterpretation of why we fought the Civil War. He said in arguments – it wasn’t in the decision – that basically, we fought a civil war to bring in a more equitable (something like that) society. And no, we didn’t. Even during the Civil War, people who were in favor of ending slavery were not in favor of Black people having equal educational, political or cultural status.
So it was a foundational misunderstanding, on the chief justice’s part, of why we fought the Civil War that was quite alarming. But part of the issue is the assumption, again, [of] this false perception of advancement, that “oh, there’s no more problems, there’s no need.” And this court is particularly hostile to race-based issues and systemic issues. It’s just individual, there’s no systemic issues, even in the face of everything.
However, the court’s decision was limited to higher education and, at the time, it had made a carve-out for the military, acknowledging the fact that the military is more like a business and businesses have a vested interest in having a diversity in spaces. So even in that decision, it didn’t … You have people today saying, “oh, affirmative action is outlawed in the workplace.” That’s not what that decision did.
Miller: Why do you think that the current administration has been so successful in getting corporations, over whom it doesn’t seem that they have too much authority … There’s a bully pulpit and I suppose there’s a possibility that they could use the U.S. Department of Justice to go after firms with some kind of version of reverse discrimination. So that’s totally within the realm of possibility. But it seems like even before those actions, they’ve been pretty successful in chilling DEI efforts. Why do you think that is?
Dunn: Well, I would say, have they? I mean, they have and they haven’t. We just are finishing up our shareholder season. Almost every corporation of any size has voted down anti-DEI proposals from shareholder activists. That’s like 99 to 1, or 98 to 1. So they haven’t been that successful when it comes to that. Where they have been successful are, in my opinion, people who already wanted to jettison the work they weren’t serious about anyway, and people with whom there is a lot of confusion. There’s a lot of fog of war. People are afraid.
However, when you look at the case that came out of the District Court from Florida regarding the Stop Woke Act, they had Stop Woke, which is their local anti-DEI. But the Court of Appeals said, “You can’t do this to a private corporation. That’s infringing the First and Fifth Amendments.” That’s wild, and that was permanently enjoined. So there’s actually more going on where private corporations can continue. Now, I talked about this, I have a Substack – you can have an ERG, but you can’t have an ERG and say, “no boys allowed.”
Miller: What is an ERG?
Dunn: Sorry, an ERG is an Employee Resource Group or an affinity group. You can have that, but you can’t have it and say, “no outsiders allowed.” You can’t do that, and technically you couldn’t do that before actually, so there is a bit of confusion. For companies that are acquiescing, they’re acquiescing because they want to. Look at Target. Do you want to be Target?
Miller: Tell us about Target.
Dunn: Target was the target. Target had had such a warm place in the hearts of many Black folks, who culturally made it “Tar-jay,” who culturally elevated Target. Target did embrace DEI in their contractors and the people who they work with, the products they brought in. And for Target, to so quickly fold when they didn’t have to, ended up kicking off a lot of hurt and anger, which turned into a boycott, which has significantly impacted Target’s bottom line.
Miller: Do you think that’s what shareholders of other companies are paying attention to or do they really care deeply about racial justice?
Dunn: Yeah, they’re paying attention to Target. And quite frankly, it’s like, do you want to be Blockbuster or do you want to be Netflix? You know what I mean? You need a diverse workforce to reach a diverse consumer base. Let’s just make it about business. If this is about business, every international company has always done diversity, equity inclusion, because you can’t run otherwise. You have to know the cultural and religious holidays in India, if you have a factory there. You have to know when it’s off. You have to know the policies around food. You have to know practices.
Miller: You have to code switch in advertising.
Dunn: You have to code switch in advertising. You can’t be like, we’re going to have this group slaughter cows. Like that’s not religiously [acceptable]. You cannot function as an international company and not have been doing diversity, equity, inclusion all these years.
Miller: Shari Dunn, thank you very much.
Dunn: Is there time for me to say one more thing?
Miller: Thirty seconds.
Dunn: OK. Public radio gave me a great word for my book called “interstitium.” It means the ways in which things move through our bodies. And I talk about race like that. So thank you public radio for helping me write my book.
Miller: On behalf of public radio, you are very welcome.
That’s Shari Dunn. She is the author of the new book, “Qualified.”
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
