^{The Bottom Line} Blacks Need High Quality Education, Not a DEI Agenda — Part 1

[Editor’s Note: This is Part One of a two-part article. Click to read Part Two: Blacks Need High-Quality Education, Not a DEI Agenda — Part 2.]

John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Ford Motor Company, and other major corporations are backtracking on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and returning to hiring based on merit.

Make no mistake. A work environment featuring diverse ideas and opinions is highly conducive to success. Similarly, it is important to have a work culture that includes all players on the team. But most often, DEI is focused on prioritizing race and sexual orientation over the applicable criteria of merit. This DEI agenda is problematic.

Some people counter that the “E” in DEI implies a commitment to equitable outcomes in addition to equal opportunity. In other words, equality of opportunity is insufficient — certain predetermined outcomes must also be realized.

To illustrate this viewpoint, it is commonplace for “equity” to be presented by the iconic image of “equality vs. equity,” where individuals are given boxes of various heights to place all at an equal height to look over a fence to view a baseball game.

Though the image has appeal in terms of ensuring a family can watch a baseball game together, applying this concept of equity in education or the business world is not beneficial to either students or individuals in careers.

In K-12 education, equity is leading to a dumbing down of academic standards for black students. For example, the Los Angeles Unified School District has implemented new equity-based grading policies, rewarding A, B, and C grades not based on subject mastery, but good behavior in the classroom. Virginia’s Fairfax County Public Schools has done similarly, resulting in a decrease in D and F grades for black students that led to a 4 percent graduation rate increase.

In the corporate world, the notion of equity often involves a forced outcome metric of hiring a certain number of black employees, regardless of whether candidates demonstrate they are the best person for the position. As with education, standards are changed to manufacture a certain racial outcome.

The hidden assumption of “equity” is that black students or candidates are somehow inferior to others, and thus, the only hope to make gains in hiring is to provide the metaphorical “boxes” under blacks — artificially boosting their qualification based on race — so they can compete in the corporate world. Sometimes described as the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” the idea is both condescending and offensive to blacks.

Furthermore, applying the “box” solution to corporate hiring is not appropriate because the priority of any business should be to deliver value to its shareholders rather than racial quotas for its employees.

A fundamental flaw of this new definition of equity is it’s backward-focused rather than forward-focused. Some look back on the decades of slavery and Jim Crow and conclude that equity is needed to address not only past discrimination, but also issues they deem to be ongoing and systemic.

What’s missing in this assessment is the recognition that while the history of America cannot be changed, incredible gains have been made over the past 60 years since the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964. Black Americans have made sizeable economic progress in both commensurate pay and in building generational wealth through home ownership and investments (i.e., stocks, 401Ks, Roths, etc.).

Given this progress in black America, the racism that persists in our country tends to be highly localized with respect to jurisprudence and economic opportunity rather than systemic in nature. While it could be argued this progress is despite systemic racism, the success of black Americans from places such as the Caribbean and Nigeria suggests that cultural factors, rather than racial ones, exert a stronger influence on a group’s economic success.

But one is still left with the question of how to improve black representation in the business world. The issue comes down to supply. Blacks comprise about 12.5 percent of the U.S. population as of 2024. Thus, the black population is relatively small compared to that of whites, who make up about 66 percent of the population. And despite 88 percent of blacks attaining a high school education as of 2019 (which is about the national average), black college enrollment rates declined from 38 percent in 2010 to 36 percent as of 2022.

Furthermore, blacks have the lowest rates of both enrolling and subsequently graduating from four-year colleges within six years — 14 percent, compared to 28 percent for whites. Considering that blacks are only 12.5 percent of the population and graduate from college at half the rate of whites, it is understandable there will be a much smaller pool of qualified black candidates.

Thus, instead of a misguided equity approach, the focus should be increasing the supply of quality black candidates. To do that, we need to address the root cause of the low numbers — the poor state of K-12 public education.

Rectifying the deficiency of high-quality K-12 education is a vital way to increase the supply of black students who will successfully complete their studies in college and be prepared to compete competitively for sought-after jobs.

To ensure a brighter future for black students and the professional black community, high-quality education and high expectations are the keys to success, not an equity agenda.