In the past few years, every week seems to bring headlines in the Hollywood trades heralding a studio or network’s onboarding of a new diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) executive. Netflix, Lionsgate, AMC, Warner Bros, Disney Sirius XM, TikTok, NBC — all have thrown big C-suite salaries at hires who will ensure their organizations stay in good standing with left-wing activist groups. Or, if not in good standing, at least good enough to keep Black Lives Matter and Nikole Hannah-Jones off their backs.
In fact, these days it would be harder to find an established entertainment company of any stripe that doesn’t have some in-house professional making sure all its representation i’s are dotted and t’s crossed.
Just how ubiquitous has the DEI class become in Hollywood? Despite the fact that it was doing diversity long before diversity was cool (hello Gordon, Luis, and Maria), even Sesame Street now has its own dedicated inclusion enforcer.
Though a recent article published on journalist Bari Weiss’ website, Common Sense, cited the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite controversy as the catalyst for Tinsel Town’s a-woken-ing, the truth is the entertainment world is in perfect lockstep with the rest of corporate America when it comes to the DEI trend. A recent study from the career networking platform, LinkedIn, for instance, found that diversity and inclusion officers are now the fastest growing job with “chief” in the title. Trickling down from there, in middle-management, DEI jobs are now the second-highest in demand, behind only ‘vaccination specialist,’ a role that (hopefully) won’t be quite as sought after once Covid infections recede.
The difference between ViacomCBS and Citigroup changing their hiring and promotion practices from merit-based to representation-based, however, is that ViacomCBS’s policies are instantly reflected in their public-facing product — the shows you see on your TV screen.
The Shift From Consultants to In-House
Until the last few years, a company wanting to prove its commitment to racial, gender, and sexual identity “justice” needed only to roll out a couple of annual unconscious-bias seminars and sensitivity workshops under the umbrella of Human Resources. The problem, as activists eventually found, was that such performative exercises were too easy for both management and employees to check off their to-do lists and forget. Cheap diversity statements including buzzwords like “allyship” and BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) didn’t functionally change a free market corporate culture. Even the most progressive sectors like tech still hired the most qualified recruits as opposed to the most diverse.
What that meant in Hollywood was that while studio and network execs paid lip service to feminism and racial justice, they still chose the scripts, directors, and actors sure to put butts in seats. (Doubt that money rather than white privilege was the driving factor of fame and fortune in the early 2000s? Then consider that some of the most successful actors of those decades were Will Smith, Halle Berry, and Jamie Foxx. By the same token, Ava DuVernay, Shonda Rhimes, and John Singleton became directing and producing powerhouses long before anyone had ever heard of BLM).
Thus, more and more leftist reformers began arguing that DEI must become its own initiative within an organization, rather than an offshoot of H.R. For a time, this led corner offices to contract with pricey outside consultants.
The demands such experts made could be exacting, though, as detailed in a New York Magazine story that described DEI consultancy work as “granular.” The reforms such consultants recommend include everything from restructuring salaries and bonuses, to reforming insurance options, to giving employee “resource groups” (essentially at-work group therapy where membership depends on skin color) the ability to weigh in on marketing campaigns.
But hidden within New York’s reporting was the key that explains why so many companies have now begun to turn away from outside input and instead have dedicated sometimes-enormous sums to full-time DEI staffers. The consultants told the outlet that many of their corporate clients “don’t really want to change; they just want to look as if they are changing.”
The tendency of some DEI companies to bad-mouth their clients for failing to take their advice was placed in high relief during the implosion of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group behind the Golden Globes.
When the HFPA was dealing with a P.R. nightmare over its lack of black members, it hired several DEI consultants. According to The Hollywood Reporter, two of those image fixers had different ideas about how to get the organization back in racial activists’ good graces. One quit after accusing the HFPA of refusing to “commit to concrete actions.” Ultimately, she let it be known to the entertainment press that she believed the Golden Globes’ problems were “so deep-rooted that it [was] a lost cause.”
The second consultant resigned soon after, claiming that the scope of the issue was “beyond what he originally understood it to be.”
In the end, the organization ended up with an exponentially bigger image problem than it had started with. It resulted in nearly every major industry player cutting ties with the Globes, including broadcast partner NBC. Two weeks ago, the HFPA handed out honors without a red carpet, without celebrities, and without so much as a streaming live feed for audiences at home to watch. For all practical purposes, the Golden Globes no longer exists as an awards production.
That’s the kind of cautionary tale that has been leading companies to make yesterday’s consultants today’s full-time DEI employees. The idea being that, in the high-stakes game of Hollywood media coverage, an in-house executive is less likely to leak negative information to Variety or Deadline because any failures would be their own in many respects.
And after all, the money for a DEI corner office is reportedly very good.
Quotas and Coercion
Last March, pundit David French argued that the Right puts “way too much stock in the content of diversity training materials. They treat it as culture-changing stuff when most folks approach it with a sense of bored irritation, a box they have to check before they get back to their days.” He went on to say the main reason companies do it is to mitigate litigation risk.
If French had any notion of the latest “inclusion standards” being issued by nearly every major Hollywood studio, he’d know just how outdated his understanding of current DEI practice is. And he’d know that the way the game is played these days, studios may very well be putting themselves at greater likelihood of lawsuits by acquiescing to inclusion officers’ demand.
Today, diversity standards aren’t about making sure employees don’t use offensive words or minority staffers do feel emotionally supported. They’re about hard quotas. To wit, ABC has committed to making sure 50 percent of its showrunners, writers, producers, crew, performers — virtually everyone involved with a production — checks a BIPOC representation box by the end of the year. CBS is aiming for 40 percent minority representation in its writers’ rooms and for 25 percent of its script development budget to fund projects from creators, writers, and producers who qualify as diverse.
That’s to go along with the new diversity mandates required for Oscar and Emmy Awards.
Even when a company has dutifully employed DEI staff and implemented their internal mandates, racial activists may still launch shockingly personal and vicious attacks against specific white competitors, as when 130 activist filmmakers accused PBS of a racist over-reliance on the work of documentarian Ken Burns.
Widely recognized as one of the most gifted non-fiction filmmakers of our era — a man who has honed his skill over 44 years — Burns’ name alone draws millions of viewers to the network. Yet the letter’s signatories claimed PBS’s exclusive relationship with him was the result of “uninvestigated privilege.”
“Questioning whether PBS could be doing better should not be seen as an attack,” they wrote in a sinister bit of gaslighting, “but as an opportunity for meaningful dialogue and action, and to engage BIPOC filmmakers as we chart a course forward.”
In the end, PBS gave in to their demands, promising to sink $11 million exclusively into documentaries from BIPOC filmmakers while announcing that producers who want to work with the network in the future will have to demonstrate how their project “aligns with PBS’s DEI principles.”
In other words, there were protection rackets in Sicily less effective than today’s racial justice syndicates at extracting money from frightened marks.
This kind of muscle-flexing to remove potent rivals in the job market is exactly what a former Disney producer, who asked me to withhold his name, describes.
While working for the Mouse House, the producer experienced all the racial struggle sessions, wherein he was encouraged to recognize his white privilege and guilt, that has been well-covered by independent journalists like Christopher Rufo. But he describes the real impact of DEI in much more concrete terms. For instance, in his five years with the company, he details having to maintain records that proved he was giving minority and female candidates the first opportunity (and sometimes the only opportunity) at every job.
“The vice presidents of production would tell us, ‘We’re gonna make a commitment to X amount of diversity,” he tells me. “So we had to start logging every African American that we would put forward to direct and every African American-owned company that we put forward to produce a project. And they would provide us with outside companies that were sort of collating all of the females or minorities in the industry for hiring purposes.”
What he found most frustrating was having to pass over loyal, long-time contractors to fill a racial quota. “I was like, ‘These guys have been working with us for years,’ he recalls, ‘And we know we can rely on them. We’re gonna pass over this guy who we know does good work because he’s not black? It just doesn’t make sense.”
Once hired, the producer tells me, the talent employed to meet diversity mandates often feel empowered to make demands that would have been out of the question for their white counterparts.
The Common Sense article reported on one Hollywood insider who said, “Human Resources departments at the studios and streaming services are awash in complaints directed at white, male showrunners just for doing their job. It’s gotten to the point where I won’t give notes on a script any longer to a woman or person of color.”
My source says the same. He describes one incident, asking me to keep details vague, where a black actress was hired with a clear understanding of her role in a G-rated scene. Once it was time to shoot, she decided she didn’t want to perform the scene as scripted, feeling it would mess up her hair. The director persisted, explaining that the terms of her contract were clear. The actress dissolved into tears and the director was ultimately reprimanded for his lack of racial sensitivity.
No one else stepped up to address the situation because, the producer tells me, “If it had anything to do with [anything racial], none of us were gonna say anything because, you know, it’s all just kind of, keep your head down so that the finger doesn’t get pointed at you.”
Yet for all the difficulty of trying to work under such fraught conditions, the producer says the most troubling aspect of DEI department’s oversight was the question of whether what they were doing was even legal.
“I would try to raise the issue very subtly, like, ‘Are we gonna get in trouble if I call up an agent or somebody and say we only want your African American directors? Am I going to get in trouble for that?’ And essentially the vice president told me, ‘That’s why we want you to go through these third parties.’”
By third parties, the producer means entertainment hiring platforms that specialize in offering studios only candidates of color — a business model that’s proliferated throughout the industry in the last few years despite its dubious legality.
Certainly, if there’s any hope of arresting the DEI train now that it’s barreling down the tracks, it likely lies with the courts.
Legal Standards Vs DEI Standards
I reached out to a former entertainment attorney, himself a racial minority, who’s now general counsel for a multi-billion-dollar tech firm. Once again, for the sake of his continued employment, he asked me not to use his name, but he shared that he has serious doubts over whether the kind of overtly race-based quotas now being openly employed in Hollywood are constitutional. He does, nonetheless, acknowledge that it’s happening all over corporate America, particularly in the highest echelons.
“DEI departments really push to hire minority candidates at the executive level,” he shares. “You’ll hear, ‘We really need to diversify our executive leadership team.’ Or they’ll say, ‘Look, it’s going to be most meaningful if we can show diverse metrics for the executive leadership team, so we should really stress hiring diverse candidates for this position.’”
He explains that most times non-minority candidates will never know for sure that they were passed over because they failed to meet the BIPOC requirement. “If you’re a white male, you may not make an initial selection cut, let alone second interviews or callbacks,” he says. That makes it difficult for lawsuits to develop from the outside, but if such practices are provable, they leave companies open to getting sued.
“A lot of that’s going to be due to the DEI departments that kind of push for that,” the attorney says, “And again, you know, I think a lot of times it’s couched in such words that it may not be a legal slam dunk if it were found out or discovered later.”
He continues, “The challenge for businesses is if they’re merely looking at diversity as a kind of plus factor, or simply saying, ‘Hey, it’s good to have diverse candidates,’ then that might be fine. Unfortunately, the reality is, it’s gotten to the point where it’s almost, you know, if you’re white and male, you need not apply. And I think to the extent it gets to that level, you’re going to see a lot of unlawful discrimination and unlawful termination type lawsuits, or even failure to hire, failure to consider. Especially if it’s that blatant. And it’s becoming that blatant.”
But even apart from the legal jeopardy, there’s also the question of whether the conventional wisdom that embracing DEI is a smart business decision is correct
The marketing angle is that being able to show the public that your company is “doing the work” of racial and gender justice is an inevitable net good for corporate image. The general counsel I spoke with, however, points out how greatly this assumption has proved to be wrong with at least half the country. From Major League Baseball facing the ire of fans for moving the game out of Georgia last year to Coca-Cola being blasted for telling employees to be “less white,” wokeness often isn’t the selling point it’s made out to be.
“You are seeing starting to see a pushback emerge,” the attorney tells me, “Especially in the cutting edge sectors like cryptocurrency. You’ve got these companies that are called mission-focused companies now like Coinbase who has said, ‘Look, we are not going to bring politics into the workplace, we’re just going to focus on the mission of our company.’ It’s still a significant minority view, but it is starting to emerge more strongly.”
The views expressed in this opinion piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.