Angela Bryaant
Valerie Batts
More than DEI, they aim to make workers feel welcome
As she helped launch a start-up company designed to help institutions become more welcoming to people of color in 1984, Valerie Batts ran into some resistance.
“People would say, ‘Why do we need this?’” she recalled. “‘We’re beyond race.’”
For such questions, Batts had answers at the ready.
“You didn’t change racial attitudes by changing laws,” she would respond. “You don’t change attitudes with processes and structures.”
Batts, who founded VI- SIONS Inc. along with her partner John Capitman and friend Angela Bryant, was working primarily with corporate clients and health care providers during the Reagan years — an era marked by fierce resistance to affirmative action and other efforts at inclusion. But many corporations saw drawing in people of color as good for their bottom line and health care providers saw diversifying their workforce as a way to help improve the disparate outcomes Black and Latino patients faced in the health care system.
“It became clear to many that we wouldn’t succeed as a country if we didn’t diversify,” Batts said.
VISIONS now includes 16 staff and 50 consultants, providing what is now called diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) consulting to businesses, nonprofits and government agencies.
The firm, which has long been headquartered in Boston, is this Friday celebrating its 40th anniversary with a sold-out gala headlined by former Netflix Head of Inclusion Verna Myers, feminist icon Gloria Steinem and civil rights activist Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II.
While
DEI work is now commonplace, when VI- SIONS launched, such work was
unheard of. VISIONS co-founder Angela Bryant said the firm’s approach
was informed by its co-founders: Batts and Capitman, who studied
oppression while pursuing graduate degrees in psychology, Ida
Hickerson’s experiences working in education and her own experiences
working in the legal field.
A
core concept in VI- SIONS’ approach was the idea that change must
happen at the personal level before institutions can be truly welcoming
to everyone.
“So much of the focus was on institutional and structural change,” Bryant said. “We found that that’s not sustainable.”
The
roots of DEI work go back to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, under which
firms with 25 or more employees were barred from discriminating against
Blacks and other racial minorities in hiring. That law and the Equal
Employment Act of 1972 pushed many firms to hire people of color for the
first time.
When VISIONS was founded, the firm began with trainings that helped white
employees identify and contend with their own racism, sexism and other
biases. A guiding principle for VISIONS was the question of how to make
companies and organizations that were then dominated by white males
welcoming to everyone so that diverse employees could thrive in the
workplace.
VISIONS
has survived and thrived, even as DEI work has become commonplace and,
at the same time, come under attack from right wing activists and
elected officials. The firm’s work has gone global, including work in
post-Apartheid South Africa. Batts remembers working with a government
official in Cape Town, who after completing a training was able to face
up to the biases he grew up with.
“I never thought a Black woman could do anything for me but pour my tea,” Batts recalls the man saying during a 1993 training.
“People can’t get past their assumptions if they don’t acknowledge them,” she said.
In
the current political climate, the work VISIONS and other DEI groups
perform has come under fire from conservative activists and
Republican-dominated legislatures and members of Congress.
Since
2023, states have introduced 65 laws targeting DEI programs in higher
education and state and local governments, according to the National
Education Association. Eight have passed in Florida, Texas, North
Carolina, North Dakota, Tennessee and Utah. At The University of Texas,
programs for Black students, undocumented students, Native American and
Latino students have all closed down, even as those populations suffer
from lower retention rates than whites.
In
2021, New Hampshire passed a “divisive concepts” law effectively
banning schools there from teaching about racism or sexism. The law
targets any materials that suggest “an individual, by virtue of his or
her race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether
consciously or unconsciously.”
Batts sees this current pushback against DEI as a testament to the efficacy of the work.
“That fact that there’s a backlash now is because firms like ours have really moved the needle,” she said.
Bryant
agrees. “Whoever thought that the work we were doing was so powerful —
anti-racism, anti-sexism, LGBTQ solidarity — whoever thought that it
would be so powerful that the government would seek to outlaw it?” she
said. “There’s always been pushback to it, but I was taken aback with
the statutory and structural response.”