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America’s Token Chief Diversity Officers: Change Agents Or Protectors Of Institutions And Optical PR?

America’s Token Chief Diversity Officers: Change Agents Or Protectors Of Institutions And Optical PR?

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Photo by Ono Kosuki

A chief diversity officer is an upper-level manager whose focus is on inclusion and equality at their company or educational institution. Chief diversity officers must usually have years of diversity training and experience and an advanced degree, according to the job recruitment platform Indeed. It’s considered a vital position to further inclusion, but some chief diversity officers find they themselves are tokens. Are they change agents or protectors of institutions and optical public relations? This is a question some are asking, especially in light of the lack of diversity that remains in various sectors such as tech. Many are also wondering how legit these posts are. Especially after it recently came to light that a chief diversity officer at a major organization claimed to be a woman of color but, in fact, is white. The revelation came after her mother outed her as a race imposter.

A senior staffer at the social justice organization American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) has for years gone under the name Raquel Evita Saraswati and claimed to be a Muslim LGBTQ activist of Latina, South Asian, and Arab descent. But, according to her mother, Carole Perone, the senior staffer, is white and was born Rachel Elizabeth Seidel. 

Before this was confirmed, some members of the AFSC had been questioning Saraswati and her true background. And they also wondered if she was placed in the organization as a government spy.

According to an AFSC leader, the organization has a history of being infiltrated by the FBI. It has frequently been attacked by pro-Israel groups for its work in solidarity with Palestinians. And the truth about Saraswati has shaken some in the organization.

“Imagine the trauma of people who confided in her, trusted her, and shared sensitive information about their work and about their lives, thinking that she’s a fellow person of color,” the AFSC leader told The Intercept on condition of anonymity, referring to Saraswati. “And now all of a sudden, it’s a white woman with a right-wing history. It’s scary.”

How can one tell if there is a chief executive officer who is a token? There are signs, according to Dr. Tiffany Jana, author of the book “Pleasure Activist” and a writer covering diversity, in a post on Medium.

According to Jana, the lack of other people of color and women at an organization is one sign of a company with a token diversity officer. The chief diversity officer shouldn’t be the only Black executive, or woman, for example, at a company claiming to want to move toward diversity. The department should have a serious budget as well; and the chief diversity officer’s salary should be in line with that of other exes at the firm. There should be evidence of an increase of diversity and inclusion in the company, otherwise the position is probably just a post for show.

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After the racial reckoning that supposedly occurred after the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd, many companies hired chief diversity officers and promised more diversity,

“But too many professional services companies are placing Black executives in positions with blurred responsibilities and short-term timelines,” reported Consulting.us, an online platform for the advisory and consulting industry.

In order to appear to increase Black people and women in their ranks, companies will sometime hire Black women. Whether the hire is just for show will become evident in the progress or lack of progress a company makes on diversity. 

But not just Black women can be hired as so-called tokens.

A former chief advocacy officer at the Credit Union National Association (CUNA), Robert Lewis, claimed he was hired as a token and is now considering suing.

CUNA is a national trade association for both state- and federally chartered credit unions located in the U.S.

Lewis, who was fired less than a month after his hiring on Jan. 3, claims he was a “token diversity hire.” CUNA, meanwhile, responded that race was absolutely not a factor with regard to any employment decision, Credit Union Times reported.

“CUNA will strongly defend unjustified claims and can clearly support its legitimate decision to terminate Robert Lewis,” CUNA said. “Mr. Lewis’s race was absolutely not a factor with regard to any employment decision and CUNA simply does not discriminate as to any protected characteristic.”

Lewis’ attorneys said, “We disagree with Credit Union National Association’s (‘CUNA’s’) assertion that race was ‘absolutely not a factor with regard to any employment decision’ related to Robert Lewis.”

A company’s push toward diversity could actually be a way to “protect whiteness,” wrote Sara Ahmed in her 2012 book “On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.”

In the book, Ahmed provides an account of the diversity world based on interviews with diversity practitioners in higher education, as well as her own experience of doing diversity work. She not only speaks of diversity practitioners experiencing resistance to their work, she dives deep into what might be behind the resistance.

“Racism becomes something bad that we can’t even speak of, as if to describe x, as racist is to damage or even hurt x. The organization becomes the subject of feeling, as the one who must be protected, as the one who is easily bruised or hurt. Racism becomes an institutional injury, it is imagined as an injury to whiteness,” she wrote.

She continued, “The claim ‘we would never’ use the language of racism is a way of protecting whiteness from being hurt or damage. Diversity can be a method of protecting whiteness. I would also point out that personalizing institutional racism creates a space for whiteness to be re-asserted. The speech act ‘we would not accuse you of racism’ can be translated into ‘I am not racist’ insofar as the ‘I’ that would not accuse the ‘you’ has already identified with that you. To speak about racism would hurt not just the organization, reimagined as a subject with feelings, but also those subjects who identify with the organization. They will be hurt by what is hurt as a charge, such that the charge becomes about their hurt. There is an implicit injunction not to speak about race schism to protect whiteness from being hurt.”

Still, the demand for chief diversity officers remains high–but so is turnover. The turnover is due to several reasons, the hires realize they are “tokens,” they have limited autonomy, there is no real commitment by the company, and/or their departments have low budgets that won’t allow them to truly affect change.

Nearly 50 percent of S&P 500 companies employ a chief diversity officer, according to Tina Shah Paikeday, leader of the diversity and inclusion advisory practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, and a 2019 study by Russell Reynolds.

At U.S. companies with more than $3 billion in, the median base salary of a chief diversity and inclusion officer is $350,000, according to research from the global consulting firm Mercer. The median total compensation, including bonuses and long-term incentives, is $600,000.

People attracted to the position “see themselves as change agents” yet often end up disillusioned, Pamela Newkirk, author of “Diversity, Inc.: The Failed Promise of a Billion-Dollar Business,” told The Wall Street Journal.

She concluded, “When they get into these institutions, they can find they don’t have the ability to effect change.”

Photo by Ono Kosuki: https://www.pexels.com/photo/confident-black-businesswoman-with-crossed-arms-in-town-5999896/