How to Create Cultures of Inclusion and Acceptance: A Collaborative Approach to DEI

How to Create  Cultures of  Inclusion and Acceptance: A Collaborative Approach to DEI

This is the second article of a series on social justice, DEI and the to create cultures of inclusion. If we want to foster diversity equity and inclusion in our organizations, we must create a culture of inclusion, collaboration and acceptance. In recent years, corporations, educational institutions and government have instituted Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives. As discussed in the first article in this series, they have proven to be quite controversial.  Why would this be so?  After all, the United States is a nation of diverse people. We value equality for all citizens before the law.  Diversity, equity and inclusion.  Who could disagree with these values?

There are many ways to define and achieve social justice. However, many advocates of DEI policies have used these concepts to advance a particular political agenda to the exclusion of others. If, however, we really value diversity and inclusion, we must also include a diversity of perspectives is our discussions of diversity, equity and inclusion.  In what follows, I show how this can occur.

Competing Ideologies about DEI

The conservative and progressive approaches to social justice draw upon different conceptions of what it means to be a person in society.  In the past years, DEI initiatives have largely been organized primarily around progressive political values.  Current DEI initiatives have been organized around a variety of practices: policies designed to promote the values of diversity, equity and inclusion within organizational culture; training on how create working environments congenial to diverse groups of people, hiring practices that seek to include members of traditionally marginalized groups in organizational structures.

Progressive Approaches to DEI and Social Justice

From a progressivist perspective, social roles and the broader structure of society are understood as socially constructed.  From this point of view, there is nothing essential about humans or societies that make them what they are.  Instead, the social roles that make up society are more-or-less arbitrary – they can be constructed and manipulated in diverse ways.  In the case of social justice, the progressive stance suggests the beliefs, values and practices have been constructed by groups and individuals who have been able to wield power over others.

From this viewpiont, issues of inequality in society are products of structural practices organized around the interests of powerful groups and constituencies.  When we are socialized into the existing beliefs of a society or culture, we tend to simply believe them to be true.  As a result, we often fail to see how our worlds have been socially constructed. As a result, the path to social justice involves dismantling systems of power that have traditionally marginalized various social groups based on race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, class, and so forth.  The goal is to forge new social structures that, support inclusion of diverse classes of people.  To accomplish this goal, there is a need to foster equity rather than merely equal opportunity.  Equity refers to the need modify societal pathways to move traditionally marginalized groups into the mainstream of political and social life.

Conservative Approaches to Social Justice

In general, more traditionally conservative approaches to social justice are founded on different beliefs about the nature of individuals and societies.  A classically conservative perspective tends to embrace primacy of the individual and family as the sources of social success.  From this viewpoint, the stature of individuals in society – indeed the structure of society itself – is a product of the capacity of individual actors to take personal responsibility for their actions, join their efforts together, and create social structures capable of meeting human needs.

From a conservative viewpoint, humans have an essential nature that cannot be transformed in any dramatic way by societal structures. As a result, they are skeptical of the capacity of societies to arrange environmental conditions that can fix the inherent inequalities that exist in nature – and thus in society as well.  They tend to believe that free market capitalism – with its traditional emphasis on competition and individual initiative – is the best society can do to hold out the opportunity for people to fulfill their visions of happiness.  From this viewpoint, societal experiments that seek to transform the individual tend to do more harm than good.

Nonetheless, a traditionally conservative viewpoint holds that culture can and does influence the development of individuals.  The inculcation of what might be called traditional values and skills – hard work, personal responsibility, perseverance, prudence, sacrifice, and so forth – arms individuals with the best chance to compete in the social marketplace and advance to the highest levels possible.  A traditional conservative perspective is thus a meritocratic one – those with the capacities most suited for success will rise to the top and profit appropriately from the fruits of their labor.

While many conservative thinkers would concede that social forces have an influence on the development of individuals, they also tend to believe DEI initiatives based on progressivist values fail to acknowledge the role of merit, personal responsibility and skill as key processes that influence an individual’s place in society.  Many believe that many of the “isms” that progressivists care about – racism, sexism, classism – have been reduced in ways that “level the playing field” between individuals and groups, and thus allow for fair competition for the goods of society.  Others argue that initiatives that focus on achieving equity in race, sex, and other group criteria often result in placing people in positions for which they are unskilled or unqualified – a circumstance that fails to meet the needs of either the individual or society.

What Works and What Doesn’t Work in DEI Programs

In recent years, industries, corporations, higher education and other organizations have spent vast amounts of money implementing DEI and “anti-racism” training programs. DEI and anti-racism positions have increased by 60% since 2020.  Indeed, research on the effectiveness of these programs, however, has been decidedly mixed.  Research suggests that such programs often but inconsistently foster an increase in self-reports of knowledge, understanding and awareness issues related to diversity, equity and inclusion. However, there is little evidence that such interventions have led to changes in skills and actual behavior of participants.  Other research suggests that DEI and anti-racism programs can backfire.  Many participants – particularly those from dominant races, sexes and cultures – report feelings of alienation, lack of emotional safety, blame, resentment and disenfranchisement from the programs.  Other research suggests that rather than reducing racial, sexual or cultural stereotypes, such programs may reinforce them.  Over the past decade, there has been progress in recruiting people from marginalized groups in industry and higher education. However, some have suggested that such increases have been accompanied by skepticism about the qualifications of those who have been hired or promoted in the context of these efforts.

In 2016 – almost 10 years ago — Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev published an important article called Why Diversity Programs Fail in the Harvard Business Review.  Dobbin and Kalev showed diversity programs were not increasing diversity in organizations.   The reason?  You can’t outlaw bias.  Programs that fail tend to center on control and negative messages.  They tend to blame and shame those in power, or otherwise use negative incentives to achieve their intended goals.

However, even back then, successful diversity programs could be found.  Instead of seeking merely to inculcate knowledge or to instill certain values over others, the programs that worked fostered active engagement between and among diverse people.  Of course, this is something that we have known since Gordon Allport published his classic book The Nature of Prejudice in 1954.  If you want to reduce prejudice, get different people to work together toward a common goal.   You will find that often, they will get to know each other, understand each other, and begin to see each other as persons rather than as members of different identity groups.

Dobbin and Kalev show that a key element in the process of increasing an appreciation for diversity is cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance occurs when we are confronted with incompatible beliefs. It is a type of “cognitive conflict”.  We may believe that a particular racial group is intellectually inferior; encountering counter examples to such a belief produces cognitive dissonance: how can I hold this belief in light of my experience?

The dissonance created by repeated encounters with the “other” force us to revisit our beliefs.  We change them when we come to know the other.  This is the key to long lasting change.

How to Create an Culture of Inclusion and Acceptance

People don’t like being told what to do.  People don’t like to be blamed for social ills.  People don’t like to be told that they are part of a problem.  People don’t learn to transform long-standing behaviors in a training session.  That would be like learning to play tennis in a classroom.

People do like to be part of the solution to a problem.  The best ways to teach people new skills and ways of being is to have them participate in the actual doings that lead to those ways of being.  If we want people to understand, accept, have empathy and compassion for one another, it is better to include people in activities that directly foster those skills – not in activities that tell people that suggest to people that they are consciously or unconsciously racist, sexist, ethnocentric, biased, bigoted or what have you – no matter how noble the intentions of the trainers.

What activities spawn acceptance of diversity? A quest for equity? The desire for inclusion? In any given organization, let’s work to put diverse groups of people together.   Let’s start with a statement of the problem.  Here’s one way to frame it:

Our culture – like all cultures – has often engaged in a struggle between “us” versus “them”.  We tend to favor our “in group” – people we identity with, or people who are “like us”.  We tend to be fearful or skeptical of “out groups” – people who are not “like us”, people who are different, unfamiliar or seem to think differently than we do.  We are often fearful of “them” and protective of “us”.

What are the various ways we differ from each other?  In what ways are we similar?  What are the obstacles that we have experienced en route to being who we are today?  How have we overcome those obstacles?  What help do we need to continue to improve who we are and how we can contribute to the world – including this organization?

Against this backdrop, how can we find ways to engage each other, accept each other, care about each other and work with each other regardless of our differences?   How can we help each other develop as people and as member of our organization?

Note how this statement of the problem does little to mention diversity, equity or inclusion directly.  It is not didactic. It does not identify any particular set of imperatives.  It is not written from any given ideology or way of thinking.  It invites people to identify the nature of the problem before them, and to become part of the process of solving it.  It empowers people to be active participants and collaborators rather than recipients of expert knowledge relayed by authoritative advocates of any particular doctrine.

Having stated the problem in general, how can a group of actors work to address the problem.  Here are some ways to promote genuine acceptance and care for diverse people without resentment:

  1. Help people know each other. To do this, involve people in everyday social activities – a gathering; making and eating a dinner together; an enjoyable interactive activity.
  2. Teach people how to connect about difficult issues. Helping people accept in other is, in many ways, a process of managing difference or conflict.  There are time honored principles and practices that help people listen effectively so that people will feel safe to speak (e.g., curiosity, compassion and empathic listening), and to express oneself (e.g., using I-statements; speaking without blame and judgment) so that people will be able to listen. Learn those practices and teach them as strategies of mutual engagement.
  3. Have people they tell their stories. Having learned how to speak and listen effectively, have people tell their stories.  Select topics that the group wishes to explore – obstacles to inclusion or feelings of being excluded; experiences of having been “the other” or “othered”; experiences of feeling equal or unequal in social communities; how one has benefitted and been held back by social experiences, and so forth.
  4. Don’t pit one group’s suffering against another’s. Note that all people of all backgrounds have stories to tell.  It is not helpful to pit one individual’s or group’s pain and suffering against another’s.  It is through the mutual engagement with each other’s suffering that empathic connection to each other can develop without resentment.  It is when groups seek to establish a hierarchy of suffering – when they seek to determine who has suffered the most – that the capacity for empathy gives way to resentment, guilt, shame and other debilitating emotions.
  5. Have people write about what it is like to be the Other. Help people have compassion and empathy for each other’s experience. Have people who differ widely in their experience and forms of suffering compose narratives of what it is like to be the Other.  Discuss the difficulties of putting oneself in the shoes of the other.  Teach compassion.
  6. Identify the full range of needs and problems. Through this process, identify the full range of needs that arise from discussions of difference, commonality and different modes of suffering.  Identify the unmet social needs of the group. These needs become to focus of shared efforts of problem solving within the group.
  7. Work together to identify solutions toward a common goal. This would appear to be the most difficult step in the process of developing pathways to acceptance of diversity. However, once the other steps have been successfully worked through, problems often begin to solve themselves.  In any process of shared problem-solving, the most difficult steps tend to be (a) identifying the nature of the problem – the unmet inclusion needs that people want to meet, and (b) developing compassion and trust in others.  Once problems are identified within a trusting context, the group can begin to offer solutions that meet the full range of needs.  When this happen, people are actively invested in solving the problems and contributing to each other’s well-being.

The key to diversity, equality and inclusion is to avoid the authoritative practice of teaching doctrines and instead to involve people in active, collaborative process of meeting the real social needs of diverse people who are charged with the task of working together toward a common goal.  We learn by doing, and particularly by doing with others.   We learn to become compassion people by engaging in acts of compassion over time with each other – with or without the guidance of an expert.

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