What DEI Could Be—If It Was Built to Last
Wait… he’s not going where we think he is… is he?
Diversity. Equity. Inclusion.
DEI isn’t just a framework anymore—it’s a cultural fixture. It's discussed in corporate boardrooms and cable news cycles, debated in academia, and critiqued in movie reviews. Regardless of political leaning or sector, the language of DEI is everywhere.
But ubiquity doesn’t guarantee clarity—or impact.
In this piece, I want to outline a series of fundamental tensions within the DEI movement that, in my view, hinder both its efficacy and its integrity. I believe the current model often unintentionally alienates the very people it's intended to support and misrepresents the role of systems in meaningful change. Worse, it sometimes substitutes moral signaling for operational substance.
This isn’t a takedown—it’s an invitation. An opportunity to examine whether there’s a more grounded, compassionate, and sustainable approach to addressing systemic harm. I’ll offer a reframe—A Perceptual Shift, if you will—toward applying a strengths-based model that emphasizes capacity-building over classification, solidarity over separation, and human dignity over performative allegiance.
This won’t be easy. It’s meant to be uncomfortable. But if you’re still reading, discomfort probably isn’t the problem.
Acknowledging Privilege—But Not Apologizing for It
Let’s get the obvious critique out of the way:
I am a middle-class white man.
I live with a level of visible privilege that, by nearly every metric, checks the boxes of traditional advantage. I was raised in an intact nuclear family, even with my grandmother who lived in the same house our entire lives. Today, I live in a home with my wife, we have chickens out back, a few children (both biological and otherwise), a live-in in-law suite, and—no joke—a split rail fence. (Not white picket, but close enough. We can’t have it all.)
It continues …
My parents have remained lovingly married for the entirety of my life.
I speak two languages.
I hold two master’s degrees, two bachelor’s degrees, and a career marked by professional stability and academic achievement.
By all accounts, I am among the most privileged individuals on this planet—and I go to sleep every night afraid, petrified if I were being honest, that it’ll be my last. Everyone who has spent any amount of their time on this earth frivolously can and should have a healthy fear of their maker coming for them. The pressure of current and future success in the face of having wasted past-time should weigh heavily upon all us- and if the God I pray to every night were to reveal Himself, I believe He’d confirm there isn’t a single night that passes without me ending the day on my knees, thanking God—not just for the gift of existence, but for the unbelievable grace with which I’ve been allowed to live it. It’s something those of us in recovery learn never to take for granted. But that’s a reflection for another time.
But let me be clear:
This is not a confession. It’s a context.
Even within this life of apparent advantage, there’s a darker thread—a familiar American undercurrent: despair, addiction, suicide, health disparities, the economic gut-punch of layoffs by invisible corporate machinery, generational wounds that no degree can fully heal.
The point is not to equate pain across experience or flatten real disparities.
The point—A Perceptual Shift—is to reorient the framework.
What if we stopped building movements around deficit and difference, and started building them around resilience and shared strength?
Operational Diversity vs. Identity Optics
Say you’re building a winning basketball team. (And for the record: I know almost nothing about sports. I’ve been known to say “Go sports!” with a straight face. But bear with me—this one works.)
You’d likely start with positional diversity: two guards, a forward, a center, and whatever the fifth position is (I told you, I’m limited in this sphere!). You wouldn’t stack your team with five shooters, or five seven-footers. You’d aim for fit and function. Balance that increases your chance of success.
That’s the kind of diversity I support—operational diversity. Diversity in service of outcomes.
But today’s DEI model rarely stops there.
Now the team can’t be all white—or all Black. We need gender diversity. Now we add someone who’s trans. Then someone who identifies as conservative. Now someone neuro-divergent. Someone from outside the U.S. And so on.
What started as a strategy for functional excellence has morphed into a checklist of demographics—often without context, cohesion, or clarity.
Let me be clear:
Representation matters. I’ll say it again for the people in the back, REPRESENTATION MATTERS!
But if you start by trying to engineer optics, you’re not optimizing for excellence—you’re curating a narrative.
And when curated identities become ends rather than starting points, we risk tokenizing the very people we claim to uplift.
A Perceptual Shift: Opportunity, Not Outcome
Here’s the shift:
If your team ends up being all one demographic, that’s not necessarily a failure of DEI. It might simply reflect generations of meso- and macro-systemic influence—factors that shaped access long before tryouts began.
DEI shouldn’t be a quota. It should be a question:
What upstream forces shaped the current distribution of opportunity?
What systems need to shift so that talent isn’t bottlenecked by barriers?
Because diversity of outcomes without diversity of opportunity is performative.
And pretending everyone should arrive at the same destination regardless of starting point, effort, or context? That’s not equity—it’s erasure.
So what do we do?
Cue: The Strengths Perspective
Let me tell you—I may be confident, but I’m not so arrogant as to try and reinvent the wheel.
The Strengths Perspective, rooted in social work, reorients the helping relationship around what is working—not just what’s broken. It emphasizes personal and community capacity, resilience, and resourcefulness, even in the face of adversity.
First articulated in 1989 by Dennis Saleebey and colleagues at the University of Kansas, it wasn’t just a feel-good reframe. It was a deliberate counter to pathology-based models that viewed people primarily through their deficits.
Sound familiar?
Because DEI could’ve—and should’ve—been this century’s application of the Strengths Perspective:
Acknowledging difference without reducing identity to injury
Building dignity without reinforcing division
Fostering equity without flattening complexity
Instead, much of it has become deficit-based again—sorting people by presumed fragility, and designing systems around fragility instead of strength.
This isn’t a rejection of DEI’s intent.
It’s a methodological correction.
Because if we truly want to build diverse, equitable, and inclusive systems, we must stop diagnosing identity—and start mobilizing strength.
Closing
Hopefully this felt like a bit of a roller coaster—and if you’ve made it to the end, I hope you step off not dizzy, but invigorated.
There’s more to come. I’ll be writing about how the Strengths Perspective can inform our work—from practice to policy, from community building to clinical care.
In the meantime…
🌀 Shameless Plug:
If this piece challenged you, resonated with you, or made you think—please consider subscribing to A Perceptual Shift. I write about real-world frameworks that disrupt convention and reimagine what’s possible in social work, systems leadership, and beyond.
Share it. Reflect on it. Sit with it. Thank you for being here.
💛 Dedication:
To my wife—whose courage is matched only by her clarity. You challenge everything I write with fairness, integrity, and an unwavering insistence that I become my highest version of self. Your standards are never sacrificed, and because of that, neither are mine. Thank you for sharpening me, every day.