Conservative opponents of DEI may not be as colorblind as they claim

By Abigail Folberg, University of Nebraska Omaha; Laura Brooks Dueland, University of Nebraska Omaha, and Mikki Hebl, Rice University Bobboz/iStock via Getty Images Critics of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, commonly referred to by the acronym DEI, are increasingly using boycotts and bans to fight against their use. People often argue that this anti-DEI backlash is motivated by race-neutral concerns – for example, that DEI practices are irrelevant to work performance or are too political. But our recent research, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, suggests that conservative critiques of DEI often boil down to one thing: anti-Black racism. As psychology researchers, we wanted to understand why people react to DEI the way they do. So, we recruited more than 1,000 people to take part in three related studies. For each study, we measured participants’ conservatism on a seven-point scale ranging from extremely liberal to extremely conservative. Single-item measures such as this are often used by researchers. We also measured participants’ anti-Black racism using the symbolic racism scale, which is a well-validated and commonly used measure of anti-Black racism. Research suggests that as overt racism has become less acceptable, people tend to direct racism toward symbols...