Promoting Social and Economic Justice in Black Communities in the Current Anti-DEI Climate

Hostility toward diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs threaten to widen long-term racial economic gaps in the U.S. As the demographic makeup of the country continues to shift, a failure to address these gaps will have growing negative impacts on overall national prosperity. In this paper, three issues are discussed in order to achieve the broad goal of greater social and economic justice: (1) rebranding DEI and encouraging equity and fairness principles (EFP) for all, (2) using organizational and social science theories to illustrate and explain the ongoing sources of inequity and unfairness within Black and other minority communities, and (3) changing the focus of the argument for social justice away from a moral argument to the economic argument. This paper provides conceptual and theory-based arguments to illustrate how superior organizational performance is achieved through diversity and to make the case for the proposed EFP framework. Practical and theoretical implications are explored to reduce misunderstanding of the goals of DEI and return focus toward the continued and ongoing need to address social and economic inequality.