For a little while there, I became very interesting. Not more accomplished, so far as I could tell, and certainly not more experienced. I had not added a degree, been instrumental in a startup’s exit, written a bestseller or otherwise improved my LinkedIn profile in a way that would account for the increased attention. What had appreciated, apparently, was my Blackness—the same Black man, suddenly trading at a premium. The flattering interpretation was that I had finally been discovered, while the reality was more interesting: all Black people had.
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.
I was among the found; I took the calls. I mention this because hindsight has a way of turning everybody into the person who saw through everything at the time, and I have no interest in improving my biography that way. I was skeptical, but I was also hopeful, and neither feeling prevented me from accepting an invitation to a conversation that should perhaps have occurred years earlier. Professional opportunity is not made counterfeit merely because the person extending it has recently altered their rationale for doing so. Besides, I work in marketing, a profession built in no small part on the proposition that what people want is inseparable from when they want it.
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.
What happened next is usually discussed as a story about Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and I think that understates it. DEI was merely the institutional vocabulary of the moment. The more consequential event was a temporary renegotiation of relevance. For a period of time, Black experience was not treated as a specialized form of knowledge useful primarily when the subject was Black people. It became germane to conversations about business, audiences, culture, leadership, risk, talent, and the country itself. People who had long possessed that knowledge experienced the peculiar sensation of watching its market value rise while its substance remained unchanged.
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.
Scarcity, however, was already taking a sabbatical. The résumés appeared. The executives appeared. The strategists, creatives, advisers, and board candidates appeared. Search firms that had spent years describing a difficult supply problem demonstrated, under different demand conditions, formidable powers of discovery. This was one of the period’s more useful revelations because it converted a long-running argument into something closer to an experiment. The supply of Black talent had not materially changed. The consequence of failing to find it had.
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.
This is where my profession becomes useful. Marketers spend a great deal of time listening to what people say they value and considerably more money discovering what they actually choose. The distance between the two is not necessarily evidence that consumers are lying. It is evidence that preference has a context. Change the price, the convenience, the social reward, the perceived risk or what everyone else appears to be doing, and a deeply expressed preference can become surprisingly negotiable.
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.
Then the price plummeted. The demonstrations became smaller and eventually disappeared from nightly television. The black squares traveled down social feeds into digital archaeology. Corporate declarations remained online but ceased to require much tending. Meanwhile, “woke,” a word with roots in Black vigilance, was relieved of most of its original meaning and repurposed as a remarkably capacious term of indictment. Conservative activists had already demonstrated the utility of taking specialized language such as “critical race theory,” stretching it to contain nearly every objectionable feature of progressive race politics and then making the container itself toxic. “Woke” proved even more efficient. It required no seminar, no footnotes, and eventually no definition. DEI could now be made to signify not an imperfect collection of workplace practices but an entire theory of undeserved advantage, institutional decline, and cultural excess.
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.
I do not resent this nearly as much as you might imagine. Resentment would require me to treat the calls as something I was owed, and I never did. What I had been given instead was an unusually clean view of how value gets conferred. Nothing material about me changed between the period when my perspective was newly sought and the period when it was less so. The underlying asset, if I may commit the indignity of describing myself that way, remained stubbornly constant. What fluctuated was the market’s willingness to price certain parts of it.
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.
We like to imagine merit as a stable property—something a person accumulates, and which the world eventually recognizes. But recognition has fashions too. Institutions do not merely evaluate talent; they decide, often without acknowledging that they are deciding, which forms of talent are salient at a given moment. The person can remain exactly the same while the institutional imagination around that person expands or contracts. And for a few years, the imagination expanded.
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.
That is a less satisfying conclusion, but a more useful one. It also explains why I feel no particular need to confront the recruiters who found me then and seem to have misplaced me since. I do not require a reckoning for what changed, much less a reprisal. The conditions changed, most certainly. Their clients changed. The perceived risks changed. The social rewards changed. The conversation changed. Perhaps their own convictions changed as well. I cannot know, and I am old enough to distrust stories that depend upon knowing the contents of strangers’ hearts, much less the timing and provenance of their change. I am less a victim of changing conditions than someone made unusually aware of their collateral damage.
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.
Again, this doesn’t make me a victim. If anything, it has spared me a certain kind of confusion. I know more now about the difference between being valued and being valuable, and about the danger of assuming that the former is reliable evidence of the latter. Value can exist for years before a market recognizes it, and it can survive quite comfortably after the market’s attention has wandered elsewhere. America did not finally discover Black value in 2020; it discovered a reason to value publicly what had been available to it all along.
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.
