Charlamagne tha God appeared as a guest on The Daily Show. As usual, he was funny. But he also spoke irresponsibly about diversity, equity and inclusion in corporate workplaces. In the segment, Charlamagne called attention to television commercials and other performative gestures that businesses made following the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. “To address this problem, businesses turned to a solution called diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI),” he stated. “It means more fair hiring policies, new anti-discrimination rules for the workplace, and sensitivity training seminars.” Charlamagne also noted how several companies maintain all-white executive leadership teams, as well as how good vibes, opportunistic public relations, and avoidance of lawsuits have been the prevailing motives of many DEI efforts. He’s right about all of this.
But Charlamagne took a reckless turn as he declared, “the truth about DEI is that although it’s well-intentioned, it’s mostly garbage… and you know I’m right because every one of you has sat through one of those diversity training sessions and thought, ‘this is some bullshit.’” There are several problems with such a universal declaration. First, Charlamagne didn’t officially survey or even informally poll the audience to ascertain the goodness of DEI initiatives and policies in their respective workplaces. Also, he didn’t ask if it was just one workshop that was bad, but if most other DEI efforts were good. And was it just DEI-focused programing, or were other training sessions at their jobs also low quality?
Furthermore, “mostly garbage” suggests that Charlamagne himself has participated in dozens, hundreds, or perhaps thousands of DEI programs. He didn’t disclose the number on which his sweeping pronouncements were based. He also didn’t say in which companies he had firsthand encounters with trashy DEI trainings, who the presenters were, what the topics were, and what made those activities so awful. The Daily Show’s live audience members and other viewers who don’t know better will take Charlamagne at his word and therefore erroneously conclude that all DEI initiatives are low quality.
University of Southern California is home to a well-respected center that does rigorous, high-impact DEI work with educational institutions, corporations, government agencies, nonprofits, and other organizations. I’m intimately familiar with the quality of its professional learning offerings because I’m its founder and executive director. Over the past 13 years, USC Race and Equity Center experts have done DEI work with more than 700 organizations – The United States Air Force, Nike, Google, Microsoft, T-Mobile, Mattel, NBCUniversal, Abbott, Zoom, Anheuser-Busch, Sempra Energy, Princeton University, Major League Baseball, and the National Football League, to name a few.
Charlamagne is accurate about companies employing too few Black people, especially in leadership roles. That’s consistent with my center’s experiences and observations. Whites are the majority of employees in the institutions and organizations with which we work; they overwhelmingly comprise audiences in our DEI workshops. On average, 94% of participants across industries deem our sessions practically useful and 95% rate them as excellent. “Garbage” isn’t how professionals describe our offerings in their anonymous evaluations. Charlamagne is right, there are some bad DEI programs. But he is wrong in painting them with such broad strokes. I know for sure that what we do here isn’t garbage. I also know that my center isn’t our nation’s only high-quality DEI professional learning provider.
“Over 900 studies have shown that DEI programs don’t make the workplace better for minorities,” Charlamagne asserted. “In fact, it can actually make things worse because of the backlash effect.” Did Charlamagne read 900 studies? He didn’t say where these studies were published, if they were peer reviewed, or how rigorous the research methods were. The voluminous corpus of evidence produced by highly-respected scholars at major research universities, as well as by credible organizations like McKinsey & Company, documents the numerous ways in which DEI benefits businesses. Few academic experts have deemed studies about the positive effects of DEI suspect, certainly not garbage.
Perhaps he doesn’t remember, but the influential host of The Breakfast Club has spoken at a major DEI event: the three-day Race and Equity in America Summit that my center co-sponsored with the USC Schwarzenegger Institute and the USC Safe Communities Institute nearly four years ago. Charlamagne’s segment was a one-on-one interview with me. We had amazing rapport and an incredibly meaningful conversation; hence, I’d be shocked and disappointed if he left feeling that he’d just deposited his brilliance into some sort of DEI dumpster. Did he think his part was garbage? I and most others certainly didn’t feel that way.
More than 2.4 million Americans attended our summit. Throughout the weekend, panels and interviews attracted more than 4 million participants – this means that several people joined us for one event, then subsequently came back for others. Surely, one engagement with DEI garbage would’ve been more than enough to drive people away; they wouldn’t have tuned in for additional sessions.
I’ve long appreciated how Charlamagne responsibly leverages his platform to advocate for mental health. That’s what he and I mostly talked about in our summit interview. In schools and workplaces alike, sexism, sexual harassment, sexual assault, misogyny, misogynoir, racism, homophobia, transphobia, sizeism, Islamophobia, antisemitism, and other forms of discrimination, harassment, and inequity pose serious threats to people’s mental wellness.
DEI programs and policies aim to reduce these threats and their negative effects on students and workers. In the absence of such initiatives and the professionals who lead them, organizations are highly likely to become even more detrimental sites of suffering and disadvantage for diverse Americans. Given what I recall from our excellent conversation, there’s no way I can be convinced that this is what Charlamagne wants. Yet, DEI obstructionists will misuse his words to further dismantle efforts that credible research shows make educational institutions and workplaces psychologically, financially, and physically safer.
“The biggest failure of DEI is that the number of Black people in power at big companies is basically the same as it was five years ago,” Charlamagne argued near the end of his appearance on The Daily Show. “In fact, maybe the only thing that DEI has accomplished is giving racist white people cover to be openly racist.” DEI initiatives aren’t responsible for the underrepresentation of Black professionals, other people of color, queer people, and women in corporate leadership roles. And again, very credible research studies make irrefutably clear that DEI trainings, programs, and policies have done far more for individuals and for businesses than what Charlamagne claimed.
The Daily Show airs on Comedy Central, a network that aims to make people laugh. Thus, Charlamagne’s comments were intended to be funny. The biggest problem is that leaders of the politicized anti-DEI movement will weaponize his words. The segment included a few news clips from conservative commentators who were slamming DEI. They and others will strategically use Charlamagne’s misinformed statements to further tear down the policies and practices that safeguard workplaces from becoming even more homogeneous, discriminatory, unfair, unregulated, and violent.