The Framework That's Breaking Us

I have spent more than two decades working in diversity, inclusion, and human capital. I am a lawyer. I am a Chief Diversity Officer. I have sat in the room when hard decisions were made, written the frameworks that organizations live by, and watched what happens when those frameworks either build people up or quietly tear them apart.

I am telling you, from the inside, that one of the most well-intentioned frameworks in DEI work — the oppressor/oppressed model — is doing serious damage. Not because the pain it names isn't real. It is. But because the framework itself has become an obstacle to the very healing and progress it was designed to advance.

I have watched it make things worse. I have been in trainings where people left more divided than when they walked in. I have seen initiatives built on this model harden resentment, silence well-meaning colleagues, and drive people — people who genuinely wanted to do better — away from the conversation entirely. That is not inclusion. That is the opposite of it.

The Model and Its Origins

The oppressor/oppressed framework has roots in legitimate scholarship and genuine historical grievance. It emerged from critical theory and was designed to name and analyze systems of power — to make visible what had been rendered invisible. In an academic context, as one lens among many, it has real value.

The problem is what happens when it leaves the academy and becomes the operating system for workplace DEI programs, leadership trainings, and institutional culture initiatives. When a nuanced theoretical framework gets flattened into a binary — you are either an oppressor or you are oppressed — it stops being a tool for understanding and becomes a weapon for sorting.

And when people feel sorted — when they walk into a training and immediately sense they are being assigned a role they did not choose and cannot escape — they do not become more open. They become defensive. They disengage. They nod along and say nothing. The conversation closes down exactly when we need it to open up.

What I've Seen in the Room

I want to be precise here, because vague criticism is easy and accountability is hard. I am not saying that talking about systemic inequality is wrong. It is not. I am not saying that organizations should ignore history or pretend that structural disadvantages do not exist. They do.

What I am saying is that I have sat in rooms where the oppressor/oppressed framework was deployed not to build understanding but to assign blame. Where individuals were made to feel personally responsible for historical systems they did not design and cannot single-handedly dismantle. Where people from so-called "dominant" groups were talked at rather than engaged with. And where people from "marginalized" groups were, ironically, stripped of their full complexity and reduced to a single dimension of their identity.

And the downstream effects are real. I have watched employees who genuinely wanted to be allies disengage after being lectured to. I have seen organizations invest heavily in initiatives built on this model and come out the other side with lower trust scores, more interpersonal conflict, and a workforce that has learned to perform the right language rather than do the harder work of actually connecting across difference.

The Zero-Sum Problem No One Wants to Name

There is a related problem that is even harder to say out loud in DEI circles, so I will say it plainly: when there are twenty seats and thirty qualified candidates, deciding who fills those seats based on identity — rather than on the fullest possible assessment of each individual — does not eliminate discrimination. It relocates it.

I want to be careful here, because this argument is routinely weaponized by people who oppose diversity efforts entirely and who conveniently ignore the long history of seats being filled by identity — specifically, the identity of being white, male, well-connected, and legacy-admitted. That history is real, its effects persist, and dismissing it is intellectually dishonest.

But intellectual honesty cuts both ways. When a qualified candidate is passed over not because of anything they did or failed to do, but because of the group they belong to, they experience that as discrimination — because it is. The fact that members of their group may have historically benefited from similar treatment does not make their individual experience less real, less painful, or less corrosive to their faith in the fairness of the institutions they are trying to join.

This is not a fringe concern. It is one of the central reasons DEI has lost broad public support — not because people oppose fairness, but because they have watched identity-conscious practices be implemented in ways that feel arbitrary, opaque, and yes, discriminatory. And when institutions respond to those concerns by dismissing the people raising them as bigots, they do not solve the problem. They confirm it.

The Free Speech Double Standard

The same institutional culture that elevated the language of inclusion and marginalization has, in practice, produced some of the most speech-restrictive environments in modern American life. Campuses and organizations that speak fluently about giving voice to the voiceless have simultaneously built elaborate systems — formal and informal — for determining which voices are acceptable and which must be silenced, redirected, or penalized.

This is not a coincidence. It is a direct consequence of the framework. Once you have decided that certain groups are inherently oppressive, speech that originates from or defends those groups becomes, by definition, harmful. The logic is clean. The outcome is the erosion of the very open discourse that a diverse society depends on.

Viewpoint diversity is not a conservative talking point. It is the foundation of intellectual honesty. An institution that genuinely welcomes every kind of person but polices what those people are allowed to think or say has not achieved inclusion. It has achieved a more diverse form of conformity.

When the Framework Failed in Plain Sight

The limits of the oppressor/oppressed framework were not always easy to see. Then, in the fall of 2023, they became impossible to ignore.

What unfolded on campuses across the country in the months following October 7th was, for many of us who work in this field, a moment of profound reckoning. Jewish students — a group with a long and well-documented history of persecution, discrimination, and targeted violence — reported feeling unsafe, harassed, and abandoned by the very DEI infrastructure that existed, in theory, to protect vulnerable students.

The response from many institutions was halting, inconsistent, and in some cases, silent in ways that would have been unthinkable had the targeted group fit more cleanly into the framework's hierarchy of victimhood. I am not making a political argument about the Middle East conflict. I am making an observation about institutional consistency: that a framework which claims to protect marginalized people must protect all marginalized people — or it is not a framework for justice. It is a framework for selecting who counts.

What Works Instead

None of this means abandoning the project of building more inclusive institutions. It means doing it better — with tools that actually work on actual human beings.

What I have seen work, consistently, is structured dialogue that starts from shared humanity rather than assigned identity. Frameworks that acknowledge systemic patterns without requiring individuals to accept collective guilt. Conversations that create space for every person in the room to be complicated — to have both experienced harm and caused it, to carry both disadvantage and advantage, often at the same time.

What works is treating people as capable of growth rather than fixed in their roles. What works is intellectual honesty — the willingness to say, as I am saying now, that our field has made mistakes and that naming them is not a betrayal of the cause. It is the cause.

A Different Invitation

I am not interested in telling the right that DEI is fine and they should stop complaining. I am not interested in telling the left that systemic inequality doesn't exist and they should move on. Both of those are evasions.

What I am interested in is the harder, more honest conversation: that we can acknowledge real and persistent inequality without sorting every human being into a fixed moral category. That we can build institutions that are genuinely welcoming to every perspective without pretending that all perspectives are equally well-evidenced or equally kind.

That is the work of civic discourse. It is harder than handing people a framework that tells them who to blame. It is also the only work that has ever actually brought people together.