Outsiders on the inside and the reason we should remain skeptical about DEI consulting.

In the midst of the racial “reckoning” our country seems to be experiencing, many of our nation’s institutions, including our schools, are hiring diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) consultants to help guide their reform efforts. While the hiring of outside consultants probably can’t hurt, it’s important to remain skeptical of these efforts, remaining aware of what the very hiring of a DEI consultant says about institutions.

While contracting with an outside entity for counsel may demonstrate how serious an institution is in addressing racial issues—and, one might say, there is the added benefit that obtaining a potentially objective viewpoint offers—the hiring of an outside consultant nevertheless provides such institutions with built-in excuses for its own unvarying ignorance, since the racial negligence of such institutions can always be blamed on the shortcomings from any counsel received. In other words, the hiring of a consultant may be yet another sign of further institutional avoidance, only more calculating, duplicitous, and dangerous, since now the avoidance is masked under the guise of what seems like a proactive anti-racist gesture. The fact that such gestures now seem vogue should only pique our skepticism even more about what, historically, has been a lack of institutional accountability and the persistence of absolution campaigns erected as means for evading the truth.

With the same level of certainty in knowing that I am the one writing this screed, so am I equally convinced that at least 99% of whatever information, perceptions, or prescriptions are generated from any final consultant’s report will be what an institution’s administration has already heard, in fact, has been hearing for decades from people of color, themselves. What would any institution anticipate learning that it didn’t already know? What would any institution anticipate learning that it didn’t already know based upon what it has heard all these years from the very people working within its compass? What folks of color working within these institutions have provided over the years is, sadly and quite tellingly, a tome of outsider’s appeals.

So, here’s my humble advice to any institution thinking about hiring a DEI consultant: while seeking outside opinions can’t hurt, if it’s an outsider’s perspective that you want, in addition to soliciting contributions from any professional “expert,” consider amplifying the voices and empowering the perspectives of those outsiders already within your community—i.e. the people of color who regularly work and toil for you—by listening more closely than ever to what they have to say, as they are the resident experts of what is true for them.