DEI Stories From the Front Lines

Darius’s story: Community-building, encouragement, advocacy

by a DEI Professional

Editor’s Note: This is the fourth in our series and the third interview with a DEI professional. Part One is a deeply personal interview with a DEI professional. Part Two provides background on DEI: its history and importance. Part Three is an interview with a DEI professional in higher education, doing the vital work of lifting up marginalized students and helping create a community around them. Part Four is also an interview with a DEI professional in higher education. He helps a group of marginalized students who feel unsafe or need a family — while developing his own family and supportive community.

Ensuring that everyone in his community can be fully themselves, exercising talents and perspectives that may differ from those around them, is Darius’s mission as a diversity, equity and inclusion professional. ”My background is one of living so much on the margins, from birth throughout my whole life,” he says, explaining why he is particularly drawn to this work.

Overcoming a life filled with challenges, including racism

“I was the first Black kid in my grade, and on the first day of kindergarten, people were pointing fingers at me and laughing at me and calling me the N-word,” Darius remembers. As a child from a foster family, who lived for a time in an orphanage and was then adopted, he was “acutely aware of systems of oppression, privilege, and what it means to have lack of access and opportunity.

“Unfortunately, as the first Black kid, teachers viewed me through the lens of stereotypes and communicated that to me. They talked to me as if I was not smart, was lazy, and didn’t get it or care about academics. My academic performance was variable.

“My parents did not have access to educational privilege; they grew up in the Jim Crow South. My dad did not graduate high school. My mom did graduate from high school but [was] from a very poor family. She had nine siblings, all boys, and all the brothers except one had to stop school after third grade to work in the sugar cane fields.”

Some white teachers treated Darius dismissively, despite his academic success, but one, he says, “made it clear to me that she liked me; she thought I was smart. She gave me extra work.” Soon, sixth-grader Darius was completing seventh-grade math books and getting all A’s. ”I spent the time because I had someone who believed in me.”

The first from his family of sugar cane workers to graduate from college, Darius earned a Ph.D. and was the convocation speaker at that graduation. He invited his supportive sixth-grade teacher to come. “It was a lovely moment to be able to honor her.”

A career in a privileged environment or making a difference for others

Darius had been tempted, as a graduate student, to “look the other way” from “race work” because he had succeeded in establishing himself as part of the world of privilege. “I did not want to be pigeonholed,” he says. But he felt he was called to do DEI work, because with his cultural knowledge, he had the power to make a crucial difference in peoples’ lives, as that sixth-grade teacher had done for him.

Darius specializes in creating opportunities for everyone — the conservative students who feel disrespected on a liberal campus, the ones with no family support for academics, and the LGBTQ+ individuals who felt unsafe and unwelcome. One student asked him to officiate at their wedding.

Another student enrolled in 2011 but didn’t graduate until 2025 due to family and health challenges. Darius was there to encourage and advocate for her with professors. Today, this student is a prominent artist and photographer and teaches a directed study at the university. She has been the subject of documentaries and has won awards and fellowships at the Cannes Film Festival and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

A powerful skill set, to heal a society

Ironically, the politically maligned DEI approaches that Darius uses are the very tools that could help today’s divided America to “develop civil discourse and build bridges across divides and foster cross-group empathy and perspective-taking,” he says. It starts with offering “an environment where each person can step into someone else’s shoes for a short time and have a clear sense of that lived experience,” he adds. “So much of DEI is misunderstood because people think there are only particular subsets of individuals who benefit from that. That’s not the case. Everyone benefits,” he emphasizes.

“So much of DEI is misunderstood because people think there are only particular subsets of individuals who benefit from that. That’s not the case. Everyone benefits.”

For Darius, DEI work is creating affinity groups, opportunities for civil discussion, and safe spaces for those who don’t fit into the white, heterosexual, liberal vs. conservative, physically abled and economically comfortable stereotypes. “If we have a community where everyone can come in and contribute, it is not a zero sum game. There are folks so talented and strong, who think outside the box in how they approach things, who are fabulous but never able to bring their full selves to a space,” he says.

A wearying time for those who foster belonging

Today’s punitive, anti-DEI campaign by the Trump administration threatens this. Despite some pushback from faculty and others, “there is uncertainty from day to day,” on his campus, Darius says. Courses have been renamed to eliminate DEI goals. Workshops have been canceled, reinstated and then retitled to avoid the DEI label. “Right now, nothing is predictable. I do not feel confident that I will have a job in six months,” he says.

When asked what kind of support is needed at this moment, Darius says,” I need [leadership] to be consistent and transparent with me.” The current fluctuations can make it very challenging to “know how to ground myself in this institution and do this work,” he adds. He also emphasizes the importance of not divesting from DEI work. “I have seen so much depletion of my budget. Of my people power. I was an office of three, and now I am an office of me. That is wearing me down.”

Darius says he also worries about his DEI officer colleagues, counterparts and peers. “I see them beaten down and withering…. I see that personally in terms of ways it is impacting my body, emotions, and mind and relationships. And I worry about the same for me.” He mentions that one thing he needs right now is “permission to give myself space to do things” and adds that a personal productivity coach he started working with said, “You need to think about how much time it takes to decompress, because this work is not neutral, and you need to take time for that and be OK with it.”

“Community is a lifeline for me,” Darius concludes. He recently bought a new home near hiking trails. ”I am so happy to be able to be immersed in nature and do things that feed my soul,” he says. “I go to meditation retreats for people of color and activists. And I am with my family.”