I’m A Black Woman Working In DEI & Here’s What It’s Really Like

Dria James is a former DEI executive, with over a decade of experience driving diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging across financial services, management consulting, higher education, and non-profit sectors. Now, she's the CEO and founder of Black In Diversity, dedicated to empowering Black leaders and allies to thrive while driving systemic change. Here, she takes us inside what it’s like to work in America’s most contested industry.

The emptiness of not-quite belonging followed me like a shadow from a young age. Born in the late '80s in Paterson, New Jersey, to two young parents, private school education was seen as one of the few lifelines available for Black folks looking to transcend the social, economic, and political firestorm that engulfed Paterson in the 1990s. At the time, the city was marred by rising crime rates, declining businesses, and severe budget cuts to public schools, leaving many families searching for alternatives. In fact, my mother's high school, Eastside, is featured in Lean On Me, the Black film classic that details the true story of Paterson's own Principal Joe Clark, an educator who went to extreme lengths to help improve the test scores and livelihoods of Black students at the inner city school. 

My parents, both educators, witnessed firsthand the crumbling state of local public school education: overcrowded classrooms, underfunded programs, and a growing sense of despair among students and teachers. So, they made immense sacrifices, often forgoing their own comforts, to ensure I had access to a quality education in a private school life. But that choice carried an unseen cost—a nagging fractured sense of identity that lingered long after I left the classroom.

In college, I penned a personal statement titled The Struggle of Adaptation, detailing the weight of double-consciousness I carried as a child while wading alone in a sea of white for most of my formal education. On the one hand, I knew I was privileged to attend the schools I did, gaining access to extracurricular opportunities, like playing the violin and traveling, rare opportunities that few Black kids from Paterson could even dream of at the time. But inside those classrooms, as one of the only Black girls in a space where no one looked like me, I often felt small, like my experiences and perspectives were invisible or undervalued. My educational experience was a tightrope walk between two worlds, never quite falling safely into either.

Looking back, my own awkward dance with cultural isolation set the stage for my future career as a corporate human resources executive in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Perhaps subconsciously, I was driven to resolve my internal conflict by helping other underrepresented communities navigate the challenges of educational and workplace integration with less angst. But DEI work extends far beyond my personal story, it is deeply woven into this country's history. The earliest forms of this work trace back to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which guaranteed equal employment rights to Americans regardless of race, age, sex, religion, or national origin. With that storied history on my shoulders, I enrolled at Cornell University, determined to make a tangible impact. My first step? A DEI internship at a major financial institution, where I arrived with the enthusiasm of a true changemaker, eager to reshape the narrative.

As an intern, I was involved in diversity recruiting efforts on college campuses. As a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed college junior, I put together a list of schools to visit, including Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), determined to bring diverse, qualified Black talent into the Wall Street pipeline. But I was quickly hit with my first strip of DEI yellow caution tape — I was told those schools were too small to justify a campus visit from a budget perspective and was instead directed to focus on institutions with larger enrollment numbers.

That early career disappointment was a wake-up call. As much as I wanted my work to be heart-centered and passion-driven, I realized that passion alone wasn't enough in the corporate world. Everything had to have a clear return on investment (ROI). That's why the current narrative that DEI is a shell-tactic to simply give a handout to undeserving folks is so wildly misleading. Companies wouldn't invest in these policies if they weren't economically advantageous to their bottom line.

Even with my rose-colored glasses slightly jaded after college, my resolve to do the work never wavered. I went on to build a career in HR and DEI, holding leadership roles at major financial institutions, including serving as VP in Goldman Sachs' Human Capital Management Division and later as Head of Americas Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Bain & Company, a position I left in 2022.

It wasn't until I climbed to a more senior rung of the corporate DEI ladder that my early career disillusionment fully caught up with me. In 2024, I told Power Pivots podcast host Hatu Kanu that I felt unfulfilled in my work. I wanted to coach people in a more meaningful way but didn't feel supported enough to do so. Those frustrations only deepened as I watched corporate heads pull an uno-reverse move on their diversity commitments from 2020-2024. Obviously, the pandemic disrupted our world, but the global outcry following the murder of George Floyd in 2020 definitely sent shockwaves through the DEI landscape. 

Suddenly, there was momentum. Companies were pouring money, resources, and energy into DEI initiatives. Leaders had a window to step into their power and drive real change. But within a year or two, the hype faded, and I saw the slow retreat begin. That's the insidious nature of system-based social regression. It's rarely blatant. It doesn't announce itself as "in-your-face" racism. Instead, it looks like "budget reductions" and sounds like "restructuring" and loss of headcount support. It moves through organizations as a quiet drain-out of resources until DEI efforts eventually bleed out completely or are amputated altogether. The writing was already on the wall back then, setting the stage for the all-out political warfare we're seeing unfolding against DEI work today.

I, like so many Black women in high-ranking corporate DEI positions, experienced “the glass cliff” phenomenon when I was elevated to a head DEI role in 2021. While people are familiar with “the glass ceiling” framework, which speaks to the systemic factors (like implicit bias) that keeps talent from leveling up their rank. “The glass cliff” takes corporate gate-keeping a step further by elevating women to positions of power in moments of crisis in which they are set up to fail, slowly whittling down their authority. In my role, I found myself struggling to be as effective as I wanted to be due to lack of resources and undefined expectations of what success in my position would look like. The resource drain went so far that I eventually lost every direct report in my headcount. In retrospect, the surge of DEI roles and leadership positions that came with 2020’s protests weren’t designed for long-term impact, but were instead reactive and symbolic. So I started to rethink what leadership looked like on my own terms. 

When the wave of layoffs began hitting the industry at the top of 2025 when President Trump and his administration launched their blitzkrieg on DEI at the federal level, I had already built my own escape raft. In 2024, I founded Black in Diversity to empower forward-thinking leaders and organizations to thrive. My goal is to equip diverse professionals with the truth: their presence and contributions aren't just valuable, they are essential in organizational spaces. Any homogenous group of people will never generate the same breadth of ideas or perspectives that yield the same type of thinking or output as a diverse team, and there is a wealth of research to back this data up. Diverse teams produce diverse ideas that drive better business outcomes. 

From an HR perspective, DEI initiatives aren't just about optics or feel-good initiatives and have never been about handouts. It’s about creating workplaces where employees feel engaged, supported, and satisfied. It has also never been a symbolic gesture. Instead, it is a business imperative from a profit standpoint. That's why DEI is seen as a threat; it has a real economic impact. The more diverse professionals recognize and anchor into the data-backed reality of their power, the more we can leverage our economic influence and power to push back against the systematic reversal of decades of American progress.

For my company, that means being both a refuge for weary DEI professionals and a launchpad for those ready to step into their next great act. In 2024, we partnered with the AfroTech Conference in Houston, Texas, a premier event for Black professionals in technology. During the conference, Black In Diversity led a session designed to engage with DEI leaders and practitioners who were passionate about this work but uncertain about the future of their careers. Some attendees expressed their concerns about the increasing instability within the DEI space. They also recognized the fortunate position of still being employed, given the number of layoffs and shifts in the DEI sector. 

I wanted to transform the narrative and motivate individuals from seeing themselves as survivors of a sinking ship to recognizing their potential as pioneers breaking new ground in uncharted territory. It was important to me that the heart of the session was about rewiring from a mental capacity of survival into thriving, a shift that starts with reclaiming agency over our own destiny.

We have the power to take the pen back and write the story we want future generations to read. Right now, we are constantly being bombarded and force-fed false narratives about DEI, which say that the work is futile and the people doing it don't matter, diminishing the importance of DEI work and the value of the professionals who champion it. That is false. And we don't have to accept it. Actually, we can reject that notion. We can and must challenge these falsehoods and become active fact-checkers of the misinformation we internalize.

If the story that has been written for our careers leaves us unfulfilled or undervalued, we have the power, especially now, to conjure a new vision. I want my fellow DEI professionals to see themselves not as casualties of shifting tides but as commanders on the frontlines of a new wave of American progress. Every new beginning, whether chosen or thrust upon us, begins with the discomfort of change. But the truth is, the greatest transformations often inevitably occur when we are most challenged and pushed outside of our comfort zones.