Living Corporate CEO Zach Nunn Says Most Diversity and Inclusion Programs Are Scams. Here’s Why.

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Zach Nunn is the founder and CEO of Living Corporate. Living Corporate is a multimedia diversity, equity and inclusion network that centers and amplifies Black and brown professionals in the workplace.

What most companies get wrong about diversity and inclusion programs

The reality is corporate DEI [diversity, equity and inclusion] sucks. It’s really bad. It’s the worst, actually. It’s like, yo, let’s come in here and sit down, and we’re going to throw a bunch of jargon at you that we just made up.

I genuinely believe that corporate DEI [programs], as it’s popularly practiced, is a capitalist scam.

What happens is some tragedy happens… and then corporations scramble because they know from a branding perspective they have to do something… You have to make a statement, so they might hire a PR team or something like that.

Internally, they know, we [have] got to say something because we have a handful of non-white folks here, and then also, we have some white folks [who] actually do care about these things here, so let’s go ahead and hire somebody. But, they don’t ever hire anybody to do any real work. They hire people just to… check the boxes.

[The people companies hire] don’t come in and talk about our actual policies and practices that could actually create this inclusion… do any type of data analysis on our historical hiring trends or our promotional velocity for historically marginalized people, or any type of salary analysis to identify potential inequities.

They’ll pay these companies $50,000, $60,000, $100,000, and then, they just kind of go, okay, we did something. Then, six months later… all the [tragedies] happen all over again. [It] just cycles.

How do corporate diversity, equity and inclusion programs work?

Think about [diversity, equity and inclusion programs] like a spectrum. So DEI exists as this mechanism to… mitigate litigious risk. That’s the real function of your DEI programs; it’s to monitor and mitigate risk.

Now, there’s a spectrum of external DEI practitioners. On the far right side, you have this assimilationist screening. We’re not going to talk about race; we’re going to emphasize gender. We’re not going to be intersectional, meaning we’re not going to really talk about multiple identities at once. We’re not going to talk about power; we’re not going to talk about policies or procedures. We’re not going to talk about real data-driven data back to inequity; we’re not going to do that. We’re going to try to talk about how we’re all similar. We’re going to focus on sameness and not difference.

And then you have far left, which is much more activist-focused. We’re going to dismantle systems, and we’re looking to completely reshape all of the structures that have been created here… It’s language [and] much more focused on naming behaviors and harms and systems.

The reality of privilege in everyday life

[Privilege] is not static; it has not been a culturally static definition at all. It has actually flexed and grown over time.

White privilege isn’t saying that your life was easy, and it’s not saying that you are literally handed something. What it’s saying is that irrespective of how challenging your life was, your skin color was not an additional challenge.

Why companies can’t seem to improve diversity, despite significant investments

Companies benefit from having the power, [which is] the scary part of DEI. All of this work is power redistribution; it’s actually giving authority to those on the margins for them to have some level of safety… That’s terrifying [for some companies].

There are companies right now in the banking industry and the tech industry whose shareholders want them… to do culture audits. They’re being loudly resistant [to] those audits because they don’t want to share power. [There’s] this whole dynamic of we don’t want to change our company, but also, they know it’s bad, and they don’t want to get sued.

I don’t believe that these companies really want to change… We’ve all seen companies; when they really want to do something… they just go [and] do it.