On The Root.com, Where Blackness Goes to DEI

The Root.com is a terrible website.

Its tagline is “Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude”. The Root was started in 2008 by Henry Louis Gates and Donald E. Graham. It used to employ some very good writers like Michael Harriot and acquired the independent blog Very Smart Brothas co-founded by Panama Jackson and Damon Young. In 2015 it was sold to Univision who then put it under the auspices of the Gizmodo Media Group (formerly the embattled Gawker Media), which included publications like Gizmodo (tech and sci-fi news), Deadspin (sports), Jezebel (a feminist news site) and everyone’s favorite: The Onion. In 2019, Univision sold GMG to a private equity firm and it was rebranded as G/O Media. 

The formation of G/O media functioned as the end of The Root.com as a decent if not occasionally flawed news site. Conflicts with management over editorial control and closer integration with advertisers spelled its doom. In 2021, 15 of the 16 full-time staffers left the magazine with Harriot remarking "As a staff, we came to the conclusion that, basically, The Root is over." Jackson and Young left the award-winning Very Smart Brothas brand they made famous with their unique approachable humor and hot takes about Black culture, and now the vertical is reserved for former Kamala Harris speechwriters making sweaty pitches to Black voters on behalf of Joe “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t Black” Biden. 

The story of The Root.com's tragic downfall from a moderately important outlet for Black thinkers to express relatively unfiltered opinions to a soulless content firehose is not unique. Its sister site Deadspin experienced its own mass exodus after its editor-in-chief was fired for not following the new management's directive to “stick to sports”. The independent blog scene that took off in the early aughts was a breath of fresh air in the mostly corporatized media landscape and like all good things, venture capital came to flatten it into a bland product to be sold or deconstructed for parts, in the name of profit. If you were into the world of blogs at the time, the phrase “pivot to video” will induce PTSD. 

However, my problems with The Root.com go back to before they were acquired by private equity. See, The Root.com represents the Black bourgeoisie. A class within the Black community consisting of both the wealthy and the middle-class aspirant. And because The Root is so firmly aimed at this niche demographic, their coverage has always skewed toward certain assumptions about the Black experience and Black political expression that have always felt insufficient to me. 

The Root Must DEI. 

A good example of what I’m talking about (and the impetus for this article) was a piece published last week titled: DEI Jobs Have Dried Up Post George Floyd Protests But The Ones Left Are Filled Mostly By White People.

After setting the tone with an ominous subhead: “A new survey has revealed the shocking and disturbing information.”, senior writer Candace McDuffie cites a recent study by LinkedIn on the trends in C-Suite hires and a February report by Revelio Labs revealing that the recent wave of tech layoffs decimated DEI departments. She also mentions a survey from Zippia.com (The Career Experts!) that shows 76.1% of Chief Diversity Officers are white and only 3.8% are Black.  

The entire article is 294 words and while I genuinely envy that restraint, the simplicity of the argument leaves out a lot of important context. McDuffie’s main point here is that companies very publicly committed to creating and staffing DEI departments in the wake of George Floyd’s murder but that commitment was mainly for PR. When the money got tight, these departments were the first to go. This conclusion is well presented with the sources provided, but if we are meant to take this news as “shocking and disturbing” then there is an unmentioned assumption we must make. 

DEI programs and departments are a good thing.

McDuffie doesn’t tell you that DEI initiatives in companies are good, she just leaves it as an established fact. If you are reading The Root, you know that DEI is good for Black people and racial equality. If you dig into the sources, especially the Revelio Labs report, you’ll find that companies with DEI departments tend to have more diverse workforces and people report that they want to work for a company with DEI practices in place. 

However, by focusing on hiring and employee perception, the article neglects to mention that DEI has never been effective at actually reducing bias and hostilities in the workplace. There is evidence that it can provoke backlash (something I can personally attest to). And perhaps most importantly, these departments and the people who head them were always set up to fail. 

During the height of CDO hiring the position grew 168.9% across corporate offices from 2019 to 2022, but these efforts were never sincere. Instead of undertaking real structural change within corporate organizations in order to make workplaces more welcoming and diverse, these companies made some hires and told their shiny new executives to fix everything without any real resources or power. These positions suffered from high rates of attrition and turnover, with many newly minted corporate executives burnt out from the workload and lack of support. 

DEI quickly went from a values-based corporate philosophy to a billion-dollar industry, with a lot of money spent on consultants, employee workshop programs, and HR-based punitive policies, all with dubious effectiveness. Implicit Association Tests or IATs became the gold standard in quantifying racial bias in individuals, without anybody looking into the readily available research calling into serious question the validity of such assessments. 

Spoiler Alert: They can’t actually measure bias and they are easily tricked. 

It was less a commitment to anything and more of a resume item, a vertical on the corporate web page. When CDOs were hired, the position saw high attrition, driven by burnout from too much work, little resources, and negligible support from leadership. 

DEI Another Day

I’m not saying that DEI initiatives as an idea and Chief Diversity Officer hires are inherently incapable of addressing racism and its material effects in workplaces. Many of those critical of how companies have gone about this process have also offered feasible solutions for making it better. 

But we need to be real with ourselves here. 

DEI as a corporate practice became popular because it was an easy way to market a company as supporting social justice and keeping them in the good graces of liberal consumers. This really shouldn’t come as a surprise. We’ve seen this same script with climate change and LGBTQ+ issues. We’ve even got a naming convention for this specific kind of corporate fuckery: “Green-washing” or “Pink-washing”. 

The George Floyd protests were specifically about racist over-policing and unnecessary violence inflicted on Black people. It was not about the number of Morehouse grads who get to attend corporate leadership conferences. Businesses that rely on a largely liberal and minority clientele also rely on police to clear away the detritus of capital accumulation. There was no world where wealthy white people were going to get behind “abolish the police” but they were more than willing to pay a Black woman and a Southeast Asian woman to lecture them about their inherent prejudices over dinner. 

If you take a survey of the companies that support the Atlanta Police Foundation and their efforts to build the notorious $90 million (and counting) Cop City, you’ll find many of them making nominal commitments to social justice and diversity. Shipping giant UPS holds two seats on the Atlanta Police Foundation board, while also touting their intentions for “creating social impact, advancing diversity, equity and inclusion,” and “building stronger communities.”

Darrell Ford is the Chief DEI officer at UPS. He is also the head of HR. A lot of companies merely expanded the remit of their human resources departments as a way of implementing DEI. The connection between employee inclusion and diversity and legal ass-covering that HR departments are known for is one of the many criticisms that people have made about corporate DEI. 

Before taking the position at UPS, Ford was the HR chief for chemical manufacturing juggernaut Dupont, and the company’s 2018 announcement of his hire points to his experience in leading diverse teams. This was probably great for those teams but didn’t seem to have had much ameliorative effect for the majority Black residents of the notorious “Cancer Alley” in southeastern Louisiana, where Dupont and other companies have concentrated their production of hazardous and toxic chemicals and the lifetime cancer risk is about 47X what is considered acceptable by the EPA. The residents of Cancer Alley lack the means to fight against companies like Dupont or to simply move to a safer neighborhood. 

Similarly, Ford’s presence in UPS’s corporate leadership hasn’t changed that company’s desire to destroy Metro Atlanta’s last remaining public green space so that police can practice violently putting down popular resistance. But they did hire a Black guy to make sure Janice in accounting isn’t asking to touch Tyrone’s hair anymore, so it’s all good. 

Whether or not Ford has raised these issues with his past and present employers or if he is content to ignore them and play the good soldier, it seems that DEI as a practice isn’t concerned with the material realities of being Black in America. Or anything that has to do with what the George Floyd protests were about.

Live and Let DEI

It should also be noted that The Root has a total of three articles about cop city compared to at least nine by white boy Bernie Bro outlet Jacobin (I’ve contributed two of those nine). Meanwhile, The Root has published 56 articles mentioning Fulton County DA Fani Willis, starting with a piece about her 2020 Georgia runoff win. Some of these pieces are concerned with her controversial use of rap lyrics to prosecute the famous members of rap imprint label YSL under Georgia’s overly broad RICO statute, and of course, the vast majority of articles are tracking her protracted legal battle with Team Trump over attempting to hijack Georgia's presidential election results. 

One Root article published this past August calls Willis “the most important Black woman in America right now.” 

The Root’s coverage of the deplorable conditions in Fulton County’s jails is similar to their coverage of Cop City, pretty anemic. Over 60 inmates at Fulton’s lock up have died between 2009 and 2022. The jail is overcrowded, the facilities are extremely disgusting with one inmate being eaten alive by bedbugs, prisoners are subject to violent assault by both other inmates and correctional officers, and a federal civil rights probe was opened this past July. 

To be clear, The Root has covered the horror story that is the Fulton County jail. There are three articles that I could find (two concerning the bedbug case), but there has been nothing about how Willis’s predilection for chasing high-profile cases against rappers and ex-presidents has left thousands of people stuck in these horrific conditions without being indicted. There are about 3,600 people being held pre-trial in Fulton County jail, and only 36% of them have received indictments and a trial date. It should go without saying that the majority of these incarcerated people are Black. 

How’s that for shocking and disturbing?

While The Root seems positively giddy to think of Trump and his co-conspirators spending an extending stay at Fulton's less than welcoming facilities, they haven’t taken the time to ask whether Georgia’s and Willis’s use of the RICO statute bodes ill for those mostly Black men and women who find themselves victims of American mass incarceration. 

Bringing it back to the conversation about DEI jobs, there is a palpable disconnect between The Root's explicit desire to see Black people in positions of power and how power continues to reproduce structures of white supremacy and Black marginalization no matter how diverse it looks. So far, cooperative DEI has been little more than a PR move for firms and a make-work program for members of the Black bourgeoisie with the requisite resume credentials. 

If you pursue The Roots content somewhat regularly, you’ll find a lot of the lowest common denominator work that pervades most corporately owned media outlets. There are a lot of celebrity profiles and gossip blurbs, sponsored content for companies looking to advertise their “unapologetically Black” product lines (when I first read the DEI piece it was briefly hijacked by a pop-up video ad for Target), and general fawning over any Black person who has achieved some measure of success. 

And then there are the listicles of police brutality. 

The implicit message of The Root is that there are serious problems facing the Black community due to centuries of ongoing white supremacy and the legacy of systemic racism. This message I can get down with. The problem is that their solution to this purposeful marginalization is simply celebrating individual Black success, championing the perceived precursors to individual Black success, and defending any and all successful Black people from undue criticism. 

This is racial justice ala Reaganomics. A trickle-down liberation if you will. No matter the glaring evidence that Black cops like Fani Willis and corporate CDOs like Darrell Ford have made little attempt to change the structural forces they find themselves in control of. The promise was that Black people were to be allowed in the room, not that they would be able to change the floor plan. 

A Good Day to DEI Hard

While the degree of excessive advertising and depressingly shallow writing may not have been as egregious before venture capital crushed it under the weight of profit-seeking, this core contradiction has always been there. These days Michael Harriot is known as the King of Black Twitter. His Tweet threads breaking down and eviscerating racist conservative talking points aimed at the Black community are the stuff of legend. During the halcyon days of The Root, Harriot was a major influence on my writing. If you’ve ever been mildly surprised at the one-sentence paragraphs and random profanity that seasons my work here, you have Harriot to thank for that. 

But as much as I admired the completeness with which he would take on topics like affirmative action, reverse racism, and the frustrating existence of Black conservatives, I also noticed that Harriot’s politics were increasingly antagonistic to my own. Especially when it came to Bernie Sanders, socialist economic policy, and generally anything to do with white people.

Harriot at his best and worst is someone who recognizes the deep structural rot that continues to marginalize Black people, he is more than able to call out the liberal hypocrisy of figures like Mayor Pete and Joe Biden and understand how certain economic systems are powered by Black exploitation. At the same time, he can’t help but couch these observations in an utterly insipid black vs. white dichotomy. His brand of race reductionism is almost tangible. He is unwilling to distinguish between white people who support democratic socialism and racist white Trump voters. Black voters are magical and any choice they make is both completely free from undue influence and automatically correct given the historical oppression we have experienced.

Yes, I’m bringing up old shit. 

For Harriot and both The Root of past and present, Blackness isn’t a culture we share through our resilience through racial marginalization. It's a commodity. A magical substance that confers ultimate authority. It belongs in power for literally no other reason than it is Black. What Black people do with that power matters not, in fact even criticizing what a Black person does with power is indulging in white privilege. There is a lot I agree with Michael Harriot about. But where we don’t agree, I find myself at once depressed and apoplectic at how little he cares about the application of power, only the color of its face. 

To quote comedian and demonstrably white lady Katie Halper: I have bigger ambitions than a more diverse class of oppressors. 

But The Root doesn’t, and that’s why they are a terrible website. 

Solidarity Forever.