The Diversity Olympics: Ensuring diversity within diversity

The nation has found itself, once again, with issues of diversity & inclusion at the forefront of politics, business, and more broadly in communities across the country. I won’t spend time highlighting statistics in this post, but I do want to highlight this idea of “Diversity Olympics.” While I fully support the concepts of intersectionality, I struggle with the idea that the issues for Blacks, Native Americans, Latinx, Asian-American, LGBTQIA+, People w/ Disabilities, Women, Veterans, etc. can always be lumped together in the same pot. Here a few of the issues I see:

1. Organizations pick which group they care about most, put some resources toward it, and will tout their success with overall diversity.
2. Opportunities are often made available in the form of quotas, and then every individual or company that falls into one of the aforementioned categories ends up competing for that tiny slice of the larger pie.
3. Companies don’t look to make systemic or cultural shifts because they see the Diversity Olympics as something they have to address only every few years! “Oh, they’re making noise again, let’s do something for the Blacks this year” or “Oh, we need to hire a couple more women so people will leave us alone.”
4. It creates a sense of division by pitting the various groups against one another.

Given the recent protests and uprisings, corporations have issued hollow statements of support showing solidarity and claiming that they “stand with the Black community.” Blacks seem to be in the lead of the Diversity Olympics today, until the powers that be decide to move on to another group!

Again, I believe in intersectionality, but I am unapologetically focused on the deep issues facing Blacks in America. While all of these inequities stem from the same white patriarchal colonialist capitalist roots, the specific challenges facing each community, and therefore the solutions, will look quite different, and hopefully we can acknowledge this as part of any action plan.