Several weeks ago, many of us watched Silicon Valley Bank, the 16th-largest bank in the country fail, seemingly overnight. Some saw the bank’s collapse as an opportunity to blame an all too familiar bogeyman—“wokeness”—because of the institution’s commitment to workplace diversity and making environmentally and socially minded investments, when poor financial risk management was clearly to blame.
Despite the well-documented benefits of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI), there are still many voices of resistance. Sometimes it’s overt, as with SVB’s armchair quarterbacks, and sometimes it’s more subtle.
