When I got home that night, I couldn’t stop replaying the conversation in my head. Not just the words, but the way they were said—the confidence, the condescension, the complete dismissal of any nuance. I was caught off guard in the moment, but the more I thought about it, the clearer it became: the arguments weren’t just flawed—they were rigged from the start.

They hadn’t come to discuss DEI. They came to discredit it. And worse, they framed it in a way that made it impossible to defend without first unpicking their definitions.

Take the sports example. They pointed to professional athletes as proof that merit rises naturally to the top—that we don’t need inclusion initiatives in the NBA or NFL because the best players are already on the court. What they ignored—either through convenience or willful amnesia—is that sports already went through their DEI reckoning. Jackie Robinson, Bill Russell, the integration of college sports, the rise of HBCU scouting—all of that was the result of systems being forced to change. It didn’t happen because the world suddenly became fair. It happened because people pushed through resistance.

Their favorite example of “pure meritocracy” is only what it is today because DEI-like interventions cracked it open decades ago. To use sports as an argument against DEI is not just bad logic—it’s historical erasure.

But they didn’t stop there. One of them—a hiring manager—shared a story about a Black woman coder who was hired through a diversity program and “couldn’t code.” She was a bad hire, he claimed, and had only lasted a year before being swooped up by another company, otherwise she’d have been fired.

It was meant to be a mic drop. But here’s what that story actually showed me: how quickly people turn a single anecdote into a sweeping indictment. All hires are on a spectrum. Hiring isn’t an exact science. A bad hire that you selected based on merit is a bad hire but a bad diversity hire is a referendum on the entire concept. That’s not logic. That’s bias. Confirmation bias. Survivorship bias. Maybe even resentment.

It was the same pattern in every argument: mask a deeply emotional discomfort with change as a rational objection. Pretend it’s about “quality” or “fairness,” but never examine why those systems have historically favored people who look, sound, and think like you.

Even their final point—that race matters less than socioeconomic status—wasn’t wrong on the surface. But it missed the intersection. Race and class don’t cancel each other out; they compound. A poor Black kid and a poor white kid may both struggle, but when the Black kid is also more likely to be suspended, overpoliced, underfunded, or stereotyped before they even speak? That’s not just about income.

I didn’t have the words for it that night. But I do now. What they called “meritocracy” was just a defense of a status quo they benefited from. And their arguments weren’t good-faith disagreements. They were polished rationalizations for looking away.

But what stuck with me most, as I kept thinking about it, was this:

People are all for DEI—until it costs them something.

When DEI opens a door for you, it’s progress. When it opens a door for someone else, it’s “unfair.” That’s not a meritocracy. That’s just loss aversion in action.

And for DEI to work, it can’t be championed only by the underprivileged. The people with privilege—the ones already inside—have to be willing to give up space. Not all the space. But some. That’s what equity means. It’s not about lowering the bar; it’s about leveling the playing field.

That’s the part they wouldn’t say out loud: it’s not that they don’t want DEI to work. It’s that they don’t want it to work at their expense.

And here’s the kicker: even when a DEI hire is made, they’re often not given the same support, mentoring, or leeway as others. If you’re seen as a “checkbox hire,” your margin for error shrinks. You’re not just carrying your own performance—you’re carrying the perception of everyone who might come after you. One stumble and the system points and says, “See? That’s what happens when we hire for diversity instead of quality.”

But they never say that when a person they chose to hire flames out. His failure is individual. Yours is institutional.

DEI doesn’t fail when a hire doesn’t work out. DEI fails when that failure is used as an excuse to stop trying.