I think one of the biggest problems with the modern DEI debate is that people have reduced the entire concept to quotas, corporate HR jargon, and “hiring someone because they're Black.” That's not what the underlying idea has to be. At its most practical, diversity is about making sure that the people making decisions aren't all bringing the exact same experiences, assumptions, and blind spots to the table. That matters because organizations make mistakes precisely because the people inside them don't notice what they don't personally experience.

Look at the controversy Target is dealing with right now. The company pulled a children's Halloween clown costume after customers criticized the imagery for evoking blackface and minstrel imagery. Target apologized, acknowledged that the costume was offensive, said it should never have been part of its assortment, and said it was reviewing how the product got through its approval process.

Now here's where I'm going to be careful: I'm not saying Target's DEI rollback caused this costume to get approved. We don't actually know that. There is no evidence establishing that the specific employees who approved this product would have caught the problem if Target had retained its previous DEI structure. But Target's situation does illustrate a legitimate reason companies benefit from having people with different backgrounds involved in decision-making. Target had previously maintained more explicit DEI initiatives, including its Racial Equity Action and Change program, before scaling back those efforts in 2025.

Because imagine you're sitting in a product meeting. One person looks at the costume and sees a creepy blacklight clown. Another sees a Halloween costume that will probably sell. Someone else is thinking about the photography, the packaging, and whether children will like it. But somebody with a different cultural background might look at the exact same combination of visual elements and immediately recognize a historical association that everyone else in the room completely missed. That person isn't necessarily smarter than everyone else. They're bringing information to the room that the others don't possess from personal experience.

And this isn't unique to race.

A person who doesn't have a disability might not notice that a website is difficult to navigate with a screen reader. Someone who has never had to translate medical paperwork for a family member might not realize how confusing the language is. Someone who has never encountered a particular religious or cultural practice might not realize that a supposedly harmless workplace policy creates a problem for a portion of their employees. Someone who grew up wealthy might look at a company benefit and think, “That's generous,” while someone who grew up poor immediately recognizes that the benefit doesn't actually help the people it's supposedly designed to reach.

That's why I don't understand the argument that diversity automatically means lowering standards. The entire point is supposed to be improving the quality of the information available when decisions are being made. If I'm designing a product, I don't want ten people who all think exactly like me. I want people who can identify problems I wouldn't have noticed myself. I want reviewers who can test whether a service works for people with different abilities, whether the language makes sense to people outside the company, whether a policy creates an unnecessary burden, and whether an apparently harmless design carries a meaning the original team failed to recognize. That's useful whether you're Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, disabled, religious, nonreligious, wealthy, poor, rural, urban, young, old, or anything else.

Businesses already understand this principle in practice. They conduct focus groups, test products with users, seek second opinions, build quality-assurance procedures, and ask people to challenge assumptions before a product reaches millions of customers. Those methods exist because organizations know that internal confidence is not the same thing as correctness. A team can review the same design repeatedly and still miss a problem if everyone is relying on the same cultural references, professional habits, or personal experiences. DEI can be understood through that same lens: deliberately making sure an organization isn't operating inside one giant echo chamber where everyone has similar backgrounds and therefore similar blind spots.

And yes, DEI can absolutely be implemented badly. Hiring quotas can create legitimate problems. Corporate programs can become performative. HR departments can turn legitimate concerns about discrimination into endless bureaucracy. People can abuse identity politics to shut down criticism, and organizations can treat representation as a substitute for competence, accountability, or serious review. None of that means the underlying principle of seeking out different perspectives is useless. It means the principle needs to be applied carefully, with clear standards, transparent processes, and an emphasis on improving decisions rather than merely producing the appearance of compliance.

In fact, Target's current situation is exactly why I'd rather have a mature conversation about DEI than pretend the entire concept is inherently ridiculous. The question shouldn't be, “Did Target have enough DEI?” as though there's a magic number of Black employees that prevents mistakes. The useful question is, “Did Target's decision-making process contain enough different perspectives and adequate review mechanisms to catch something like this before it reached customers?” That question leaves room for evidence. It does not assume that every mistake proves a company lacks diversity, and it does not assume that diversity alone can solve every organizational failure. It asks whether the company built a process capable of identifying risks that a narrow group of decision-makers might overlook.

We don't know the answer yet. Target is investigating that process itself.

But that's the conversation I'd rather be having.

Because diversity isn't valuable because every minority person possesses some magical sixth sense about racism. It's valuable because every human being has blind spots, and putting people with different experiences in the room gives you more opportunities to discover those blind spots before they become somebody else's problem.