When Diversity Became a $9 Billion Industry, Black People Became a Line Item

There is a particular kind of swindle that only works when the victims believe the swindler is on their side. The confidence man who steals your wallet is a criminal. The confidence man who steals your wallet while telling you he is fighting for your dignity is something far worse — he is an industry. And the diversity, equity, and inclusion industry in the United States of America is now worth, by the most conservative estimates, $9.4 billion annually. That number comes not from a conservative think tank, not from a right-wing media outlet, but from Global Industry Analysts, a market research firm, and has been cited by McKinsey & Company in their own analysis of the corporate diversity landscape. Nine point four billion dollars a year. And the question that no one within the industry has an incentive to answer is the simplest question in economics: what did the customer receive?

Because the customer, let us be clear, is supposed to be us. Black employees. Black communities. Black people whose representation, whose equity, whose inclusion is the stated product of this $9.4 billion machine. And after twenty-five years of sustained corporate investment in diversity programs, after the largest social justice mobilization in American history following the murder of George Floyd, after more than $200 billion in corporate pledges to racial equity, the documented outcomes for Black employees in corporate America have moved so little that the numbers round to zero.

The $200 Billion That Vanished

In the summer of 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, corporate America erupted in a performance of racial solidarity that was, by any financial measure, the largest such performance in history. Companies pledged money. They pledged commitments. They pledged transformation. Bloomberg and the Washington Post both undertook tracking projects to follow the money, and what they found is a masterclass in institutional misdirection.

The majority of the pledged amounts were not grants to Black communities. They were reclassified existing spending. JPMorgan Chase pledged $30 billion to racial equity, but the vast majority of it consisted of loans and mortgages that the bank would have issued anyway, now rebranded as racial justice commitments. Bank of America’s $1.25 billion pledge was largely composed of business loans and affordable housing investments that were already in the pipeline. When Bloomberg tracked the actual new money flowing specifically to Black organizations and communities — as opposed to money that was relabeled, redirected, or structured as loans with interest — the number shrank to a fraction of the headline figure.

This is not conspiracy. This is accounting. And the fact that it required investigative journalists to translate the pledges into actual numbers tells you everything you need to know about who the pledges were designed to impress. They were not designed to serve Black communities. They were designed to manage the public relations crisis that George Floyd’s murder created for brands. The audience was not Black America. The audience was Twitter.

The Training That Does Not Train

If the pledges were a misdirection, the training programs are something worse: they are a documented failure masquerading as a best practice. The most comprehensive study of diversity training effectiveness in the academic literature was conducted by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev at Harvard University. Their analysis, published in 2016 and based on data from over 800 companies spanning three decades, reached a conclusion so devastating to the DEI industry that it has been functionally ignored by the industry itself: mandatory diversity training does not increase the representation of women or minorities in management positions, and in many cases, it decreases it.

Read that again, because it is the most important sentence in this article. The central product of the $9.4 billion DEI industry — the diversity training workshop, the unconscious bias seminar, the mandatory sensitivity session — has been studied for thirty years and it does not work. It does not change behavior. It does not increase representation. And in cases where it is mandatory and perceived as punitive, it actually triggers a backlash effect that reduces the willingness of managers to promote diverse candidates.

Dobbin and Kalev’s research identifies the mechanism: mandatory training activates psychological reactance — the human tendency to resist being told what to think. Managers who feel they are being accused of bias respond not by examining their behavior but by reasserting their autonomy, which frequently means making hiring and promotion decisions that are less diverse, not more. The training that was supposed to correct the bias instead entrenches it.

The Implicit Bias Test That Cannot Pass Its Own Test

The cornerstone of much corporate diversity training is the Implicit Association Test (IAT), developed by Anthony Greenwald, Mahzarin Banaji, and Brian Nosek in 1998. The IAT is designed to measure unconscious racial bias by timing participants’ association speeds between racial categories and positive or negative attributes. It has been taken by millions of people, deployed in thousands of corporate training programs, and cited as the scientific basis for a generation of DEI interventions.

There is one problem. The IAT’s test-retest reliability is approximately 0.44, which means that if you take the test today and take it again next week, there is a substantial probability that your score will be meaningfully different. In psychometric science, a reliability coefficient below 0.70 is generally considered inadequate for drawing individual conclusions. The IAT falls well below that threshold.

Furthermore, Oswald and colleagues’ 2013 meta-analysis found that IAT scores are a poor predictor of actual discriminatory behavior. Knowing someone’s IAT score tells you very little about whether they will discriminate in hiring, lending, medical treatment, or any other real-world domain. Even the test’s original authors have acknowledged limitations, yet the industry built on the IAT has shown no interest in incorporating these limitations into its sales pitch. The test is too profitable to correct.

And this is the machinery upon which billions of corporate diversity dollars have been spent. A training methodology that does not change behavior, built on a measurement instrument that does not reliably measure what it claims to measure, sold to corporations by consultants who charge between $15,000 and $50,000 per workshop and who have no contractual obligation to produce a measurable outcome.

The Prophets and Their Profits

The DEI industry has produced a class of celebrity consultants and public intellectuals whose personal wealth has grown in direct proportion to the absence of measurable progress for the people they claim to serve. This is not an ad hominem attack. It is a financial observation, and the numbers are documented.

Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility (2018), commands speaking fees of $40,000 or more per appearance. Her book has sold over two million copies. Her consulting firm, Racial Justice Education, provides workshops to corporations, universities, and government agencies at rates that place her among the highest-paid speakers in the corporate training market. Her central thesis — that all white people are complicit in systemic racism and that any denial of this complicity is itself evidence of the complicity — is unfalsifiable by design. There is no data that could disprove it, which means there is no outcome that could render her services unnecessary. The business model is structurally permanent.

Ibram X. Kendi, author of How to Be an Antiracist (2019), was given $20 million by Boston University to establish the Center for Antiracist Research. The center was launched with enormous publicity and higher ambitions: it would produce scholarship, policy recommendations, and community programs that would transform the conversation about race in America. In 2023, the center was placed under investigation by BU following reports of financial mismanagement, staff layoffs, and a near-total absence of published research or measurable community outcomes. Kendi laid off most of the center’s staff, and multiple former employees went public with descriptions of disorganization, financial opacity, and a failure to produce the work the funding was designated to support.

Twenty million dollars. The budget of a mid-sized nonprofit. The operating capital of a small school district. Given to one man to produce antiracist scholarship, and the documented output was a handful of articles, a mass layoff, and a financial investigation. And the question that no one seems willing to ask in public is this: what could $20 million have done if it had been given to Black teachers, Black business owners, Black vocational programs, Black scholarship funds — to the people doing the actual work of building Black capacity in America, rather than to the people theorizing about why the capacity does not exist?

“I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” — James Baldwin

The Black Employees Who Were Supposed to Benefit

If the DEI industry is producing results, those results should be visible in the experience of Black employees in corporate America. They are not. Glassdoor’s annual survey data shows that Black employee satisfaction, sense of belonging, and retention rates have not meaningfully improved despite a decade of intensifying corporate diversity investment. The McKinsey reports that are so frequently cited by the industry itself — the “Diversity Wins” series — document that Black representation in senior leadership at Fortune 500 companies remains below 5 percent, a number that has barely moved in twenty years.

Black employees at major corporations report, in survey after survey, that the DEI initiatives their companies celebrate in press releases do not translate to their daily experience. They attend the workshops. They see the posters. They receive the emails celebrating Heritage Month. And then they watch the promotion go to someone else, again, for reasons that are never quite articulated but are always understood. The industry has produced a vocabulary of inclusion without producing the inclusion itself. It has given corporations the language of equity without requiring the practice of equity. And it has given Black employees a new and uniquely modern form of frustration: the experience of being told you are valued by an institution that compensates you less, promotes you slower, and retains you shorter than your white colleagues, all while paying a consultant $50,000 to explain why this is everyone’s unconscious bias and nobody’s specific responsibility.

What Actually Works — And Why Nobody Is Selling It

Here is the uncomfortable truth: the research on what actually improves diversity outcomes in organizations is clear, specific, and well-documented. It is also simple, unglamorous, and impossible to monetize at $50,000 per session. Dobbin and Kalev’s research identifies the interventions that actually move the numbers:

Sponsorship, not mentorship. Mentorship gives advice. Sponsorship gives access. A sponsor is a senior leader who actively advocates for a specific employee’s promotion, assigns them to high-visibility projects, and uses their own political capital to advance the employee’s career. Research from the Center for Talent Innovation (now Coqual) shows that Black employees with sponsors are 65 percent more likely to be satisfied with their rate of advancement than those without. Sponsorship is not a workshop. It is a commitment by a specific person to a specific outcome for a specific employee. It costs nothing. It requires only will.

Objective hiring criteria. When hiring decisions are based on subjective assessments — “culture fit,” “leadership potential,” “communication style” — bias enters through every door. When hiring decisions are based on specific, measurable, pre-defined criteria applied consistently to every candidate, representation improves. This is not a theory. It is documented in every controlled study of structured versus unstructured interviews.

Diverse interview panels. When a Black candidate is interviewed by an all-white panel, bias is structurally inevitable regardless of the panel’s intentions. When the panel itself is diverse, the documented outcome is a more equitable assessment process. This intervention costs nothing. It requires only scheduling.

Promotion pipeline tracking. Organizations that track the demographic composition of their promotion pipeline at every level — not annually, not in a report that sits on a shelf, but in real-time dashboards that are visible to leadership and tied to accountability metrics — produce measurably better diversity outcomes than those that do not. This is not a training. It is a management system. And it works because it replaces the subjective goodwill of individuals with the objective visibility of data.

None of these interventions can be sold as a two-hour workshop. None of them generate the kind of revenue that supports a speaking fee of $40,000. None of them provide the emotional catharsis of a confessional seminar where white employees cry about their privilege and everyone goes home feeling like progress was made. They are boring. They are structural. They are specific. And they are the only interventions that the research shows actually work.

The Intervention

I want to speak directly now to every Black professional who has sat through a mandatory diversity training and felt, in some unarticulated place beneath the compliance, that something was wrong. You were right. Something is wrong. What is wrong is that you have been made the occasion for a $9.4 billion industry that does not serve you. You are the justification for the budget. You are the photograph in the annual report. You are the reason the consultant was hired, and you are the last person who will benefit from the consultant’s fee.

The DEI industry does not need to be reformed. The parts that do not work — the mandatory trainings, the implicit bias workshops, the confessional seminars, the celebrity consultants — need to be replaced with the structural interventions that the research shows actually produce outcomes. Sponsorship programs. Objective hiring criteria. Diverse panels. Pipeline tracking. Accountability that is tied to specific, measurable results, not to the number of workshops completed or the volume of tears shed in the conference room.

And if those structural interventions are implemented, the $9.4 billion industry will shrink dramatically, because the industry’s revenue depends on the problem remaining unsolved. A consultant who solves the problem loses the contract. An industry that eliminates bias eliminates itself. And so the industry, by the logic of its own economics, must ensure that the workshops continue, the seminars multiply, the speaking fees increase, and the outcomes for Black employees remain exactly where they are: unchanged, undocumented, and invisible behind a wall of corporate language so carefully constructed that it takes a forensic accountant to determine that nothing happened.

James Baldwin warned us about this. He said the American way of dealing with any problem is to make it a commodity. To package it, to brand it, to sell it back to the people who suffer from it, and to call the sale a solution. The DEI industry is the most expensive confirmation of that warning in American corporate history. Nine point four billion dollars. And the only people whose lives have been materially transformed by that investment are the people who cashed the checks.