America, in 2020, was in one of its ephemeral periods of racial lucidity. The images from Minneapolis had accomplished what decades of statistics, testimony, earlier images, and earlier funerals had not: They had made ignorance difficult to maintain. Corporate America, which is exceptionally good at detecting changes in the weather, responded accordingly. Nonprofit arts organizations, which are exceptionally good at detecting what corporate America has already detected, responded shortly thereafter. Statements were issued, commitments were made, reading lists circulated, listening sessions convened. White colleagues, newly acquainted with the concept of white fragility, turned with considerable enthusiasm to a white academic to explain it to them. Job-search mandates broadened, and, with remarkable speed, qualified Black people were found.
In November 2020, while much of the country was still speaking of a racial reckoning as though the reckoning had already produced a result, I wrote in American Theatre about my own difficulty believing that the country’s newfound racial consciousness would endure. George Floyd’s murder had entered my home, my work, and my seven-year-old daughter’s understanding of what might happen to her Black father. By the end of that essay, she had decided to join me on my morning walks to make sure I was safe. I wrote then of America’s “fleeting capacity to love.” I had seen enough cycles of national horror, recognition, resolve, and amnesia to distrust the permanence of our attention. Rodney King, Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo, and too many others had already taught the lesson. What I did not know was whether George Floyd would become another name in that sequence or the name that finally broke it. I hoped for the latter while understanding how mercurial the odds could be.
That distinction matters because the conventional explanation for exclusion has so often been scarcity. There were not enough qualified candidates. The network did not yield them. The search had been exhaustive. Or, more delicately, the organization had decided it was looking for someone with more fundraising experience, more institutional experience, more experience at scale, more experience with precisely the thing that had somehow escaped mention in the prospectus but acquired decisive importance once certain candidates came into view. The pipeline, that blameless piece of corporate infrastructure, could always be counted on to justify the final decision.
That is not quite the same thing as hypocrisy, which is the accusation most readily available and therefore the least interesting. Hypocrisy requires us to know that people did not believe what they said. I suspect many of them did believe it. The chief executives signing letters, recruiters widening slates, and colleagues posting black squares may have been entirely sincere. Human beings are capable of sincere conviction whose durability depends heavily on the surrounding conditions. Institutions are even better at it.
For a time after George Floyd, overlooking Black people became expensive. There was reputational cost, employee cost, consumer cost, and, perhaps most powerfully, the cost of appearing not to understand what everyone else suddenly understood. Institutions adjusted with an efficiency that suggested the obstacle had never been quite as immovable as advertised.
Organizations that had once competed to describe the depth of their commitment became newly interested in precision of language, then in different language, and sometimes in no language at all. Some programs disappeared, some were renamed, some survived, and some of the people who had been very interested in hearing from people like me became interested in other things. My phone, which has always possessed a sophisticated understanding of macroeconomic and cultural conditions, adjusted too.
That is a different proposition from saying race was suddenly all anyone valued about me. It would also be unfair to the people who called, many of whom were interested in the full range of what I knew and could do. The subtler point is that race altered the aperture through which everything else became visible. Experience that had existed all along acquired a different legibility once the culture had decided that the person carrying it might know something newly worth knowing. And there, I think, is the part of the story that survives the exhausted arguments about DEI.
This is why I resist both the triumphant account of 2020 and the betrayed one. The first asks us to believe that a durable transformation occurred because institutions said one had. The second asks us to believe that every retreat proves the original commitment was fraudulent. Neither gives people, or organizations, enough credit for contradiction. A conviction can be genuine and conditional at the same time. Indeed, most convictions probably are. What 2020 revealed was not that corporate America had suddenly developed a conscience and then misplaced it. It revealed the conditions under which conscience could become operational.
There is a phrase economists use, revealed preference, for the idea that what people choose may tell us more than what they say they prefer. I have come to think of the years since 2020 as an extended exercise in revealed preference. We learned that institutions could find Black talent when failing to do so carried sufficient consequence. We learned that the faces in meeting rooms could change quickly when sameness became uncomfortable. We learned that expertise once considered peripheral could become central without the experts themselves changing at all. And we are learning now that none of those discoveries was durable.
So, to the recruiters who called, the organizations that listened, the executives who discovered urgency, and the many people who genuinely believed we had crossed some permanent threshold, I offer neither accusation nor absolution. I am simply acknowledging what the market has told me. For a season, Black was not merely a race or an identity or one of those demographic boxes whose insufficiency we periodically rediscover. Black was insight, credibility, perspective, access, urgency, and, in certain rooms, capital. Then it wasn’t.
My daughter is older now, a teenager, and no longer joins me on morning walks to make sure I am safe. I have never forgotten that she once felt she had to. Nor have I forgotten the hope of that period, when it seemed possible that the country’s attention might finally have acquired the endurance its conscience had so often lacked. But I’m wiser now. I do not look at my phone in expectation.
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