For Black Americans and their allies of any race or ethnicity to move forward with focus and urgency toward a society that includes, protects, empowers, and is co-advanced by us, we need to consider a few points of distinction about the current state of American culture and our economy while acting on several others.
As the CEO of Justice Informed, a social impact consulting firm that has advised on billion-dollar acquisition deals, written the DEI strategy for Fortune 500 executive teams, advanced the development of $40m racial reparations funds for Black people and built collective action networks that bring small business funding and protection to thousands of Black people across America, it is clear to me that we need to update our understanding and expectations of our country and ourselves.
We must understand that Blackness, and all identity, is more publicly fractal than it has been in the history of our nation. The 1960s are not the 2020s. More minoritized people, including more types of Black people, are now vocal and present in the work of justice. We must unite with them with respect, invitation, and strategic focus. No longer can people say “Latinos” and mean Mexican (Latinidad is broad); or “disabled” to mean someone in a wheelchair (disability is visible and invisible, like autism or color blindness); or “Black,” and that means a descendant of enslavement in America (Some African-American immigrants have blue passports and speak Yoruba).
Today, we are each more responsible for being specific to strategically advance solidarity and needed cross-identity alliances. And to make space for others as much as we say we want space for us. With the rise of BIPOC and POC, people often say, “Stop saying Black and Brown when you just mean Black.” On paper, those acronyms do not create a sense of solidarity among people of color in real life. Let’s stop using this “until we get ours, you don’t get yours” argument and start realizing that Black and Brown people alike face the same class and labor injustices.
Black LGBTQIA+ youth are more likely to be abused in police custody than straight Black youth, but all of them are impacted by police violence. First-generation Mexican immigrants living two blocks away from the “Black border crossing” in your major city face similar struggles. As MLK noted: “We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality…injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
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With the new attack on race-focused small business grants and loan programs, identity-focused college scholarship and internship programs, and nonprofit funding for communities of color, we must play the ball where we need it to go: equity. Don’t start with diversity when discussing DEI. Representation is important. But our goal has always been equity. MLK’s dream of being judged on the content of character in an America that is equal has been both destroyed as an ideal and weaponized to be a tool against his family and descendants in a way that we now need to be smart about. Educate yourself in the language and tactics of the work of social equity.
Saying you want equality is not the same as saying you believe in doing the work of equity. Old-schoolers would hold two fingers to one side of the face to a friend across the room to gesture “I’ll call you.” The gesture doesn’t make sense to Gen-Zers who have never had a home phone and when cell phones do not have earcups and mouthpieces. Time often meaningfully changes things. Diversity and equality are 20th-century goals that have been co-opted. They’re not wrong but unhelpful when used as starting or ending points for our work in the 21st century.
When Dr. King preached about equality, it was because he was living during the Jim Crow era, where racism was more visceral and visible. So long as you’re solely working for a visible end to racism and inequity, the deep waters of systemic racist infrastructure in our laws and business programs will remain. We live in a world with few lynchings and many locked into poverty. We all need to update our language for the current fight: a subversive attack on measurable progress for increasing safety and opportunity in a land that provides statutory freedom to all but experiential discrimination to some.
They are fighting against specificity in our actions, not equality in our country. Thus, you need to fight for specificity in our actions towards equity in our country. Let’s stop preaching about equality when the work to get there is what they’re fighting against. The RNC, MAGA crowd, and conservatives of all types believe America is already colorblind. As a result, anyone saying “Black people are having a different experience from White people in America” is racist and anti-American.
If the solution to remedying past and present statistical inequities in homeownership, wealth, educational attainment, etc., focuses specifically on Black communities but not White ones, it is viewed as discrimination based on unequal treatment. Opponents of DEI are fighting specificity. They can understand why people with impaired vision may need glasses but not why federal or business programs help Black people who haven’t been able to engage and work their way out of poverty in five generations. They want the solutions to injustice to profit them, even if the causes and maintenance of inequity don’t harm them. They’re committing to an outcome while outlawing the work to achieve it. Hold them accountable for outcomes, not intentions.
We can’t keep talking about DEI as simply getting Black people jobs or evaluating allyship based on how many Black people are on the “About Us” page on the website. It matters to see Black people in big jobs and imagine it’s possible. But, that’s not a helpful lead strategy. It has to be an auxiliary or tertiary move that comes after we have a foundation for equitable outcomes, not equal representation.
Leading with representation plays into the hands of those who say programs focused on representation are discriminatory. They’re making an anti-diversity argument. The detractors of racial and gender equity’s argument amount to an attack on diversity–they keep throwing the ball to uphold that two wrongs don’t make a right. They’re talking about their problem with the idea of creating programs that address inequity. What’s their stance on what promotes equity?
Black people and allies: please catch yourself when you’re defending DEI but only talking about diversity. It happens all the time in my work at Justice Informed. After a 45-minute speech about equity during a 2024 DEI in global insurance conference, a room full of mostly women and people only had questions about diversity. I challenged them to write down three goals for their company that weren’t about diversity. Most couldn’t. Can you?
Use the word “qualified” every time you are talking about diversity. That immediately shuts down the “you just want us to discriminate against people” argument. Ask your boss about that. Ask that question to the Chief Diversity Officer, who removed “equity” from the company DEI statement. Ask the HR lead why they removed specific goals for representation of qualified Black people and women from the DEI strategy but don’t have any consequences for maintaining a workplace with an unequal representation of qualified people. Ask them why there are no qualified, Black queer men in leadership and what the recruiting strategy is for LGBTQ+ leaders? Hold the argument at “What’s your solution that will work, not your problem that ignores the disparity?”
Remember the data and remember the play: we wouldn’t need diversity programs if QUALIFIED Black and Brown folks weren’t currently shut out of jobs. Are they saying Black people aren’t qualified? Ask them directly, “Why have none of the top 5 technology companies in America been able to have at least 10% of their staff be African American?” Wait for an answer. You must learn to wait and let the pregnant pause be the answer. They’re going to have to acknowledge racial and gender injustice is the current (not some Jim Crow era issue), and that’s when you ask them how they intend to fix it and what policies and practices they would support to advance more people of color into jobs and economic security?
Ask them why the average Black household has less than $5k in wealth while the average White American family has over $100k. Let them name their stereotypes and biases as they fight against unconscious bias trainings. You need to have the questions. They need to have the answers. Not the other way around.
Don’t play the ball where they throw it; play it where it needs to go. We need equity. We need solidarity across identities. We need to update our talking points. We need to expand our awareness of data that depicts the present, not just talk about how we want a better future. We need to hold them accountable for results, not goals. And for us, we need to drive the solutions and celebrate the successes America has when it finally becomes the country it said it was all along.
Xavier Ramey is the founder and CEO of Justice Informed, a Chicago-based social impact consulting firm. He is also an award-winning social strategist, noted public speaker, and conflict mediator. www.xavierramey.com
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