How Hollywood’s New Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Executives Are Shaping What’s On Your Screens

In the past few years, every week seems to bring headlines in the Hollywood trades heralding a studio or network’s onboarding of a new diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) executive. Netflix, Lionsgate, AMC, Warner Bros, Disney Sirius XM, TikTok, NBC — all have thrown big C-suite salaries at hires who will ensure their organizations stay in good standing with left-wing activist groups. Or, if not in good standing, at least good enough to keep Black Lives Matter and Nikole Hannah-Jones from their doorsteps.

In fact, these days it would be harder to find an established entertainment company of any stripe that doesn’t have some in-house professional making sure all its representation i’s are dotted and t’s crossed.

Just how ubiquitous has the DEI class become in Hollywood? Despite the fact that it was doing diversity long before diversity was cool (hello Gordon, Luis, and Maria), even Sesame Street now has its own dedicated inclusion enforcer.

Though a recent article published on journalist Bari Weiss’ website, Common Sense, cited the 2015 #OscarsSoWhite controversy as the catalyst for Tinsel Town’s a-woken-ing, the truth is the entertainment world is in perfect lockstep with the rest of corporate America when it comes to the DEI trend. A recent study from the career networking platform, LinkedIn, for instance, found that diversity and inclusion officers are now the fastest growing job with “chief” in the title. Trickling down from there, in middle-management, DEI jobs are now the second-highest in demand, behind only ‘vaccination specialist,’ a role that (hopefully) won’t be quite as sought after once Covid infections recede.

The difference between ViacomCBS and Citigroup changing their hiring and promotion practices from merit-based to representation-based, however, is that ViacomCBS’s policies are instantly reflected in their public-facing product — the shows you see on your TV screen.

The Shift From Consultants to In-House

Until the last few years, a company wanting to prove its commitment to racial, gender, and sexual identity “justice” needed only to roll out a couple of annual unconscious-bias seminars and sensitivity workshops under the umbrella of Human Resources. The problem, as activists eventually found, was that such performative exercises were too easy for both management and employees to check off their to-do lists and forget. Cheap diversity statements including buzzwords like “allyship” and BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) didn’t functionally change a free market corporate culture. Even the most progressive sectors like tech still hired the most qualified recruits as opposed to the most diverse.

What that meant in Hollywood was that while studio and network execs paid lip service to feminism and racial justice, they still chose the scripts, directors, and actors sure to put butts in seats. (Doubt that money rather than white privilege was the driving factor of fame and fortune in the early 2000s? Then consider that some of the most successful actors of those decades were Will Smith, Halle Berry, and Jamie Foxx. By the same token, Ava DuVernay, Shonda Rhimes, and John Singleton became directing and producing powerhouses long before anyone had ever heard of BLM).

Thus, more and more leftist reformers began arguing that DEI must become its own initiative within an organization, rather than an offshoot of H.R. For a time, this led corner offices to contract with pricey outside consultants.

The demands such experts made could be exacting, though, as detailed in a New York Magazine story that described DEI consultancy work as “granular.” The reforms such consultants recommend include everything from restructuring salaries and bonuses, to reforming insurance options, to giving employee “resource groups” (essentially at-work group therapy where membership depends on skin color) the ability to weigh in on marketing campaigns.

But hidden within New York’s reporting was the key that explains why so many companies have now begun to turn away from outside input and instead have dedicated sometimes-enormous sums to full-time DEI staffers. The consultants told the outlet that many of their corporate clients “don’t really want to change; they just want to look as if they are changing.”

The tendency of some DEI companies to bad-mouth their clients for failing to take their advice was placed in high relief during the implosion of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the group behind the Golden Globes.

When the HFPA was dealing with a P.R. nightmare over its lack of black members, it hired several DEI consultants. According to The Hollywood Reporter, two of those image fixers had different ideas about how to get the organization back in racial activists’ good graces. One quit after accusing the HFPA of refusing to “commit to concrete actions.” Ultimately, she let it be known to the entertainment press that she believed the Golden Globes’ problems were “so deep-rooted that it [was] a lost cause.”

The second consultant resigned soon after, claiming that the scope of the issue was “beyond what he originally understood it to be.”

In the end, the

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