The New Diversity is for Fighting Fascism
Doing the DEIB work the world needs now
Fascism is not foreign to America. Anyone who has experienced racial discrimination in employment, whether legal or cultural–think ‘No Irish Need Apply’–has known this. Japanese American families relocated to internment camps during World War II have known this. Black Americans who have struggled for social and economic equality, who live with fear of even the most benign police interactions, have known this.
As antiracist scholar-consultants working in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging, we have intimately known that, even within American democracy, fascism—the desire of some, or one, to rule by force and the desire of others to be ruled by force—is alive and well. Still, it was like entering a strange alternate existence when we found ourselves attending the funeral of a racist-fascist quasi-dictator. There we were, together with our child, at the funeral of Silvio Berlusconi.
We were in Italy for a conference on antiracist scholarship, but the first few days we were sightseeing in Milan. The Duomo was on our list of things to visit, but we had been unable to get tickets to go inside. Nevertheless, we figured exterior views would do, so we sauntered down the shop-lined streets filled with fashionable Milanese, and more than a few fellow tourists, until we arrived at the medieval cathedral.
The scene unfolded slowly. As trained academics focused on the history of race, we are used to noticing small bits of evidence and piecing them together until they amount to big conclusions. We founded our own consulting company to help leaders foster inclusive culture by identifying and using small, subtle signs, too. The first thing we noticed were the spires on the Duomo. They’re delicate. Spindly. Yet their effect is immense. There are only 135, but it seems like there are thousands. Small subtle signs.
Much less subtle was the absolute crush of people in front of the church. Something big was going on. But knowing what required attention to subtlety again. Many were looking down. Some were looking up. We got closer. There were jumbotrons in the crowd. A priest. A church service. It didn’t feel great to be touristing during services.
But, still, why such a large mass? And mid-day on a Wednesday?
We realized that the folks looking down were in grief. So were some of those who were looking up. It dawned on us. We were at a funeral, and the funeral of someone very important indeed.
Then we saw a man, bearing a huge homemade sign high up into the air: “Il più Italiano degli Italiani,” “The most Italian of Italians.” The sign-bearer was draped, shoulders-to-toe, in the Italian flag, over his black suit and navy tie.
We were at the funeral of Silvio Berlusconi, the leader without whom Italy likely wouldn’t now have a bona fide fascist prime minister in Giorgia Meloni, and without whose precedent the U.S. electorate may never have had a taste for Trump. Berlusconi had died mere days before, and we had assumed—thinking more of U.S. federalism than Italian regionalism—that his funeral would be in Rome.
Berlusconi laid bare the interdependence of fascism and racism. Italian prime minister from 1922 to 1943 Benito Mussolini is widely recognized as one of only two fully successful fascist leaders, along with Hitler. Berlusconi closely followed him in employing what’s known as Great Replacement Theory, the idea that the in-group, the good people, the desirable ones, are being replaced by some supposedly undesirable group. In 1927, Mussolini contended that Italy faced a racial emergency in which Italians were having too few babies while Africans and Asians were “multiply[ing],” in Mussolini’s words, “with a rhythm unknown to our own [Italians].” In 2008 and 2009, on the heels of the Berlusconi administration’s attacks on Roma camps and policies against Libyan immigration, his party’s undersecretary for health mimicked Mussolini almost verbatim: “This is a country that is dying from low birth rates…from a migratory flow so massive that it renders integration difficult.” He registered the same fear as Mussolini: “…Italians will disappear.” Berlusconi saw it as his job to keep the Italian “race” safe from incursion, and it would require strongman tactics to do it.
What were antifascist, antiracist DEIB professionals like us to do? Fortunately, we are inveterate Star Wars fans, and it was as if we heard Yoda’s voice: “Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.” As an interracial family at a fascist’s funeral, we had some fear. But we also had our training. A lynchpin of the methods we use to help leaders and their organizations develop DEIB strategies is compassion.
Having compassion for those you might otherwise fear is the bedrock of how we promote equity.
The sign-bearer kept our attention. He was in tears. His eyes were red and narrowed. He had been crying all morning. The aggression in his sign meant that, under other circumstances, we might have good reason to fear him. Had he been American, he could have found himself committedly climbing the walls of the U.S. Capitol, or chanting "You will not replace us!" in Charlottesville. Instead, a wave of compassion swept over us.
We knew from his sign, his flag, and his distress that he held strong beliefs in separation–that he believed that some things were for some people, that others were for other people, and that there were strict and inviolable divisions between those groups. His sign proclaimed that there was one way to be Italian that was better than another way, and that one person had performed the better way more successfully than anyone else. He even translated his sign into English, so more people would know. As he cried and clutched his flag, it was clear to us that these beliefs had caused him tremendous pain.
Compassion involves empathy. And empathy can involve some imagination. We often ask ourselves, and clients: what is the kindest, most generous story you can tell to explain the behavior of someone who has hurt someone else in your organization? Or who has hurt you? Or who you think might hurt you? We imagined the sign-bearer as a boy of six or seven. He sits at a kitchen table with his mother. She tells him that his father has lost his job and that the family will have less this year. He is worried that his parents cannot care for him. “But Italians survive. We know how to take care of our own,” his mother states forcefully. “And Berlusconi is the most Italian of Italians.” There is fear in her voice. It was 1994 and Berlusconi was about to become prime minister for the first time. “If others have less, we will have more,” the boy thought, so he chose to believe her.
You can’t fear a boy who believes his mother.
Seeing a white man experience intense emotional connection to white supremacist groups is not unusual. There is plenty of evidence that members of far-right groups such as the Proud Boys or, more internationally, The Base, come to their convictions similarly. A feeling of disaffection and disempowerment motivates potential members, and recruiters exploit those feelings–sometimes subtly, sometimes plainly–by offering a feeling of power and self-determination. Sometimes it’s wrapped up in a movement and the feeling of membership. Sometimes it’s connected to one charismatic leader–a Berlusconi or a Trump. Sometimes it’s both. All too often, the perpetrator was a victim first.
Until now, DEIB efforts have usually sought to do several things: divest empowered people, usually white, of racist beliefs; increase the representation of people of color, women, queer folx, and people from other oppressed demographics in spaces and organizations; and empower the latter set of people through the traditional means of education, money, and professional achievement. There has been some success.
But now, the limits of traditional DEIB approaches are apparent. Last year’s Supreme Court decision against affirmative action in college admissions has left people wondering how best to effect diversity in the future. Hamas’s October 7 attack and Israel’s retaliation in Gaza have left campuses, businesses, and cultural organizations struggling with what free speech means and how to balance it with identity and mutual respect. Telling people what they ought to think or say, especially when they understand it as giving up power or privilege to someone else, only goes so far. It’s like telling the little boy that it’s a good thing someone else has his father’s job now. It doesn’t matter whether it promotes the globalization of the economy, saves money for the company, or diversifies the workforce. The effect is the same: the little boy feels fearful and devalued.
The DEIB worker could walk away from this exercise in compassion convinced that they must go out and find every grieving (or Capitol-wall-climbing) sign-bearer, build a relationship with him, show him compassion, and he might just become a diversity-loving, left-leaning, kind and generous soul. It’s true. He might. We work closely with diversity professionals who specialize in transforming white supremacists and white-supremacist-adjacent communities. They get a long way with compassion.
Nonetheless, had we gone about Milan looking for everyone who might be holding racist beliefs or who might need comfort because of childhood trauma or for any reason at all, we would have tired very quickly. And we would have done nothing else that day.
Anyone who has done any kind of DEIB work–whether in a dedicated position or on top of their “real” job, whether for their employer or within a community organization–knows that one person can’t reach everyone. Burnout comes quickly when you try.
There is, however, a way to positively affect the people around you, and it does not involve running yourself ragged by trying to meet all of their needs. It starts instead, and entirely, in yourself. If you are–or want to be–an antifascist-antiracist, whether you are a person of color or a white ally, start with your own memories. Many of the most famous civil rights workers recounted stories of childhood encounters with race. The moments when they first developed a racial consciousness stand out. In 1903, famed sociologist, activist, and writer W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of an experience in the mixed hamlet of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, when he first realized he was different. All the kids were playing with calling cards, pretending to be adults paying official visits to other adults, when a white girl summarily refused his. Martin Luther King, Jr. recounts a similar story when a white playmate of his stops playing with him. The white boy’s father, who owned the store across the street, had ordered his son to stop playing with Martin because of their racial difference. A friend of ours in her late 50s tells a similar story. When she was growing up in the very same neighborhood we live in now, she and her siblings regularly played with the white children who lived across the street. Then, one day the white children’s father came home, ordered the children into the house, and screamed violently inside. It sounded to my friend like he may have been hitting his children and wife. The children were never allowed to play with my friend and her siblings again.
These moments happen to our white clients, too. We’ve worked with a distinguished professional whose parents forced him to end an interracial relationship with the love of his life, a marketing specialist whose grandfather threatened to write him out of his will depending on who he married, and a physician who was told to uninvite her Black friends to a family party. All of them complied and all of them have carried shame, sadness, and fear into the allyship conversations that we hold with them today. When we address those emotions in our work together, they feel calmer, more energized, and more confident in their equity work.
We all have difficult memories, whether explicitly racial, explicitly about power and abuse, or about another moment when we felt oppressed. But we may not yet have chosen to identify and acknowledge those memories. If we want to challenge racism and fascism, we should.
We, and our nervous systems, are not islands. This knowledge is key to diversity and inclusion work. In his bestselling My Grandmother’s Hands, therapist and racial trauma specialist Resmaa Menakem writes that “Although they don’t always realize it, people visit my office to be with my settled, regulated nervous system.” He elaborates: “their repeated contact with my nervous system helps their nervous systems settle.” The reverse is true as well. Psychologists have long known that mob mentality catches, and that it results in disorganized mass events such as riots and, when mixed with organizing yet malicious authority, mass atrocities.
For many, DEIB work has felt like a Sisyphean task, repeatedly pushing a boulder uphill only to have it roll back down. Diversity executives, hired at breakneck pace after the 2020 killing of George Floyd and the racial reckoning that followed, are increasingly finding themselves burning out or their jobs eliminated. For one thing, it makes it difficult to do your best work when, as one study found, one in three DEIB workers at major companies in tech and related sectors lost their jobs in 2022. Your job–in many cases, your entire department–is always on the chopping block. Despite significant data supporting the value of DEIB to profitability and efficacy, decision-makers often see it as a luxury that only supports employee satisfaction and good PR. It’s easy to cut. What’s more, confronting discrimination can feel painful, and some methods exacerbate that pain. When DEIB work causes or, more accurately, reveals pain without offering healing and resolution, it feels easy and even good to excise it.
If one works from a settled nervous system, however, DEIB work becomes far less difficult and the outcomes improve. The DEIB worker is better able to handle setbacks or organizational blocks without deep and often (re-)traumatizing personal disappointment. What’s even better is that some of the blocks disappear. Individuals or groups within your organization often resist inclusive initiatives out of fear; they fear the loss of power, they fear new structures they don’t already know how to navigate, they fear that they may be exposed as having been part of the problem, and sometimes, they simply fear the unpredictability of change. If the DEIB worker can use their own lack of fear to co-regulate with fearful persons, then there is more hope and more appetite for change. More people get behind it because DEIB feels good.
A settled nervous system, less fear, and an appetite for change are a healing trio, and they are what made it so strange and powerful to be at Berlusconi’s funeral. It was an opportunity for us to witness political ideas that have created tremendous fear and suffering, not only for us personally as an American interracial couple, but also for our country and humanity more broadly. It was also an opportunity for us to apply what we've learned through our own healing. This healing trio is not only what makes a more diverse and functional organization possible. It applies to political systems, too. Fear and a sense of loss–like that of the little boy who became the sign-carrying mourner wrapped in the Italian flag–animate fascism. Racism and fascism go hand-in-hand. The healing trio that works against one works against the other.
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging will not move forward as a set of policies that aim to force representational diversity. Real DEIB requires identifying pain and doing the work of healing, individually and collectively. Healing feels good, and healed people invite others into healing processes. To be healed is to feel safe. And when we feel safe, there’s no longer any need to turn to an authoritarian strongman.
Lesley Curtis and Cord Whitaker are co-owners of Sagely, a consulting company focused on trauma-informed DEIB. They both hold doctorates in the literature and history of race and are each writing new books on DEIB, healing, and history. Lesley is a visiting instructor at UNC-Chapel Hill and Cord is associate professor of English at Wellesley College.