On Tuesday’s broadcast of NPR’s “Morning Edition,” former State Department Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer Gina Abercrombie-Winstanley argued that there won’t be a cycle where DEI programs go away under Republican administrations and return under Democratic presidents and “the work is going to continue. People will walk into rooms, and if they don’t see a level of diversity, they will know the right people are not in the room.”
Co-host A Martínez asked, [relevant exchange begins around 3:30] “[A]re DEI program’s going to be on a sort of cycle, where, if there’s a Republican in the White House, it’ll likely go away, and if a Democrat wins, it may return?”
Abercrombie-Winstanley responded, “Yeah, I don’t think so, because I think everybody, as I said, wants to belong to an organization that is inclusive. So, even if the name changes, the work is going to continue. People will walk into rooms, and if they don’t see a level of diversity, they will know the right people are not in the room.”
Earlier in the interview, Abercrombie-Winstanley stated that Trump’s order “strikes fear in people’s hearts so that they may not choose to make the right decisions to help all employees, as opposed to just ones that are within the in-group, as it were, or look like them or, in this case, may be of European American background.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
