DEI 1.0 was crazy. A viral Atlantic essay shows nonprofits a way out.
Tyler Austin Harper's "Confessions of a Token Black Professor" gives sector leaders the raw material for an honest reckoning — and a framework for what comes next.
By Eboo Patel
Contributor
September 3, 2026 | Read Time: 6 minutes
- The cultural momentum on DEI has shifted, including AOC calling Woke 1.0 "crazy," creating an opening the nonprofit sector shouldn't waste.
- Honest reckoning requires leaders to ask whether their own DEI programs made unreasonable demands on staff, treated identity as a job qualification, or distracted from the mission.
- Owning past mistakes isn't about guilt — it's the groundwork for rebuilding public trust and designing diversity programs that treat difference as a source of pride rather than victimhood.
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During the past decade, those of us who raised reasonable concerns about the way progressive institutions were implementing diversity initiatives could expect to be dismissed as shills for right-wing causes.
When we pointed out that calls to cancel Thanksgiving or defund the police might not be fruitful strategies for empowering minorities or building healthy pluralistic communities, we risked being accused of everything from supporting white supremacy to personally sending ICE agents into the streets — not to mention jeopardizing potential foundation grants and speaking engagements.
The winds, however, have shifted. Last month, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, quoting a local city council member, said “Woke 1 was crazy.” At about the same time, The Atlantic published a cover story by Tyler Austin Harper titled “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.”
It could easily have been titled “DEI 1.0 Was Crazy.”
In the essay, Harper, formerly a tenure track humanities professor in the environmental studies department at Bates College, discusses how what he considered the inanity and degrading nature of the college’s diversity, equity, and inclusion program led him to leave his dream job. Most people I know in the nonprofit world have read the article and want to discuss it. But I haven’t heard much about how their institutions plan to use the piece to improve their own DEI efforts.
So I want to make a modest proposal: Organizational leaders should treat Harper’s essay the same way they treated Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture,” or Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” or Ibram X. Kendi’s “How To Be An Antiracist.”
Buy print copies for your whole team. Read sections aloud at a staff meeting. Host a town hall with your broader community about what it means. Devote your next board meeting to discussing the piece and invite Harper to give the keynote address at your next conference for a handsome fee.
During the Great Awokening, many organizations bragged about their courage in reckoning with systemic racism. But it was the excesses of these antiracism efforts that Harper found so degrading. He concluded that Bates’s DEI programs profoundly compromised the institution’s mission.
A diversity study guide
Any discussion of Harper’s piece should make three things clear from the start.
First, Harper cannot be dismissed as a right-wing shill. He is a self-professed socialist who believes diversity is important and who broadly supports policies such as affirmative action. He is not closet MAGA.
Second, nonprofits need to frame the discussion honestly. That means asking this critical but uncomfortable question: “Did our organization’s approach to DEI programs compromise our mission and degrade our colleagues?” Don’t try to evade that question by replacing it with an easy one like “Well, isn’t systemic racism bad?” Of course it’s bad! But that doesn’t mean your DEI programs were good.
Third, if you discover some uncomfortable answers to Harper’s uncomfortable questions, don’t be tempted to say that the intent was good. Instead, reflect on the number of cancellations, call outs, and other cruelties done during the last 10 years under the banner of “intent doesn’t matter — only impact.”
Next, your organization should dig into the substantive questions raised by Harper’s essay.
He opens the article by describing how the DEI leader at Bates insisted that racism lurked everywhere in idyllic Lewiston, Maine, where the college is located, a little like how evil hangs in the air in a Stephen King novel. But Harper actually felt quite comfortable in Lewiston. It reminded him of the working-class Pennsylvania city where he grew up, and he resented not being able to represent his own experience.
- Reflection opportunity for your institution: Do your diversity programs describe normal environments as racist? Do they let minorities represent their own experiences, or do they convey that the organization likes them more when they act like victims of racism?
At one point, Bates administrators required every department to conduct an audit of its curriculum in search of racism. They even floated the possibility of each academic unit offering an antiracist course. Harper reports feeling like an “antiracist truffle pig” digging for evidence of racism in the environmental studies curriculum. At first this seemed like inane busywork, but after a while Harper came to view it as educational malpractice: Would people who had no expertise in racial issues, such as chemists and physicists, have to pretend to be experts on the topic, and perhaps even teach courses on it?
- Reflection opportunity for your institution: Did your commitments to DEI make ridiculous, even destructive, demands of people? Did the energy spent on such initiatives distract people from work that was more relevant and meaningful? Did this make your institution less effective?
Harper describes being appointed co-chair of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day committee purely because he was black, not because he had any special expertise on King or racial justice issues. He recognized that his identity was relevant in some situations. It might, for example, inspire a Black student to pursue a career in environmental studies. But he did not like the idea that his skin color was a job qualification, and that somehow his actual job qualifications — his excellent teaching and impressive publication record — were less important.
- Reflection opportunity for your institution: Did you treat skin color as a job qualification? If you did, is that good practice? Should airlines treat skin color as a job qualification when hiring pilots? Hospitals when hiring heart surgeons? Separately, did treating skin color as a job qualification cause resentment, even in the people you thought you were helping?
Owning past mistakes
When I told a friend about my idea that leaders should use Harper’s piece as the basis of an organizationwide exercise, she asked me: “What’s the purpose of that, to make people feel guilty?”
“No,” I said. “To make people feel free.”
DEI programs across civic society absorbed and institutionalized Woke 1.0, in all its craziness. The only way to release ourselves from the mistakes of the past is to own up to them. AOC and Tyler Austin Harper have given us excellent material to start the conversation.
Accountability is uncomfortable, but it prepares the ground for new work. Once our sector faces the problems of DEI 1.0, the public is more likely to trust us to build the next generation of improved diversity programs.
When the process of owning past mistakes feels hard, take comfort in the inspiration of what that might look like: diversity programs that treat variety — race, religion, nationality, gender, sexuality, ideology — as a treasure; that view identity as a source of pride rather than a status of victimization; and that don’t exist to cancel those we disagree with, but to cooperate constructively across our differences.
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