When Capitalism Isn't Enough

Business was counting on market forces to eliminate inequality. They haven’t, and society is tired of waiting

- By Rebecca Greenfield

In 2017, Denise Young Smith summed up the modern approach to Diversity and Inclusion while speaking at a conference in Bogotá, Colombia. “There can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blond men in a room and they’re going to be diverse, too,” Apple Inc.’s vice president of D&I at the time said. “They’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.” She apologized for the remarks a few days later and left her post not long after that, but her comments were revealing. Diversity initiatives had drifted far from their original mission to get more women and minorities up and down the corporate ladder.

At the heart of Smith’s thinking was a mantra that had been driving human resources departments for the previous decades: the business case for diversity of thought. After the civil rights movement, affirmative action— laws and practices that give special consideration in hiring to groups that experience discrimination— had been the driving force behind workplace equality initiatives. But in an influential 1990 Harvard Business Review article, a former organizational behavior professor named R. Roosevelt Thomas Jr. introduced corporate leaders to a new approach that, frankly, they found more palatable.

Thomas argued that policies forcing companies to remedy centuries of slavery and racism by hiring more Black people had done their job, and it was time to move on. White men no longer entirely make up the U.S. business mainstream, he wrote, and widespread prejudice no longer kept minorities out of jobs. “The realities facing us are no longer the realities that affirmative action was designed to fix,” he said.