Jocelyn Nicole Johnson

Because DEI makes America great and good

My dad grew up Black and bookish in the Jim Crow South and was, essentially, a DEI hire before diversity, equity, or inclusion were cool. His grandfather, who helped raise him, hoisted one-hundred-pound bags of fertilizer into a trailer and delivered truckloads to local farmers for a living. The older man also read the paper daily and ferried envelopes of cash to the company’s bank; even so, they hired young white men to “manage” him for multiples of his pay. 

After my dad graduated from a local Black college, IBM came to town to recruit Black talent. Arguably the Apple of its day, IBM had been required to diversify its workforce on federal contracts. My dad’s test scores earned him a golden ticket to migrate North for this work, where he first had to survive brutal rounds of computer-science boot camp. He began his career coding in the basement of the Pentagon, running punch cards through a room-sized computer. He retired forty years later after serving as a top manager on a national airport safety project in response to 9/11.

When Trump and his people pervert the ideal of DEI (or rabidly mock the outsider), I can’t help but think of my dad’s quiet brilliance or my great-grandfather’s bowed back. Never mind that studies show diverse workplaces are more creative and profitable than homogeneous ones: In America, every public school, every thriving city, is an exercise in DEI. Even so, Trump’s platform of inequity and exclusion consumes our attention while his party diverts power and money from public institutions and toward billionaires. By contrast, the movement around Harris and Walz embodies two simple truths: America owes what goodness it can claim to the sacrifice and striving of people who sit just outside of its promise; and whatever future greatness we hope to achieve depends on investing in all types of people, and in a common good.

Jocelyn Nicole Johnson’s dad is super proud of her award-winning fiction debut, My Monticello.