DEI Shouldn’t Just Be a Black Thing… They Just Do It Better

By Pedro de Cordoba is a multicultural marketing and sales consultant.

It’s been bugging me since Gene Bryan of HispanicAd.com raised the issue on his website in early September. My compadre was ranting about the glaring omission of Hispanics in a piece written by Amira Barger a DEI practitioner and executive vice president, Health DEI at Edelman. The piece in PR Daily titled  “No, you are not ‘over-indexing on Black”  is a well written argument as to why organizations must challenge their pre-conceived notions on their DEI efforts in regard to the Black community. She frames and supports her argument with solid facts from the vantage point of “what it means to be employed while Black, to what it means to be represented in marketing while Black” kudos to her. Gene’s point was that the piece should have been more inclusive as opposed to Black focused. I believed that was entirely Ms. Barger’s prerogative. But the omission did leave me wondering why when DEI comes up, it always seems to be in reference to the Black community.

Qué pasó con nosotros büey? We Hispanics seem to be late to the DEI party (insight; we are late to any party but that is fodder for another time). The problem with being late to this DEI-fest is that we are missing out on the funding, visibility and all the good things that come from being seen and heard in all the right places.

I did a perfunctory google search. If you type in African American DEI initiatives you get over 5 million results. When you type in Hispanic DEI initiatives and you get a mere 716,000. Someone is eating our cookies, and one thing all of us who fall under the DEI umbrella know for sure, they’re not enough cookies to go around.

The African American community has a long storied history of driving positive change in this country, surely there are lessons to be learned from their approach in knocking down barriers. Kudos to our African American colleagues and counterparts, they are totally owning the DEI space. Maybe during this Hispanic Heritage Month, when every office in the country celebrates our heritage with taco days, we can show up at the budget buffet and ask-or even better demand a la Oliver Twist-“Please sir, can I have some more.” Que siga la fiesta…I hope we’re not too late.