Symone’s story: conflict, challenge, restoration
by a DEI professional
Editor’s Note: This is the first in our series on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. 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.
Despite all the conversation about and animosity toward diversity, equity and inclusion, commonly called DEI, very rarely do we hear from DEI professionals speaking for themselves in their own words. The series, “DEI Stories From the Front Lines,” will elevate the stories and voices of DEI professionals in order to break through the fear mongering and projections. It will connect readers with the actual people and explain what they do; why that’s important to individuals, organizations and workplaces; and how activists can support DEI professionals and programs.
The first interviewee for this blog series is a young Black woman whom we’ll call Symone. She requested that we use this pseudonym to protect her identity.
Working in DEI
To understand what it means to work in DEI — to support diversity, equity and inclusion in a shared community — we spoke with Symone, a mental health professional whose passion in graduate school was helping people struggling with trauma. In the midst of the recent society-wide traumas inflicted by the COVID pandemic and George Floyd’s murder, she felt called to broaden her social justice impact beyond a clinical one-on-one approach, shifting toward community healing that centers the experiences of people of color.
“I felt the need to do something, and I had skills to bridge wellness, trauma and DEI,” she said. After earning a certificate in diversity coaching, she began to work with White nonprofit executives, offering insights about racial battle fatigue, microaggressions and implicit bias — “things that folks of color experience in the workplace, but don’t speak to, or about.”
Incorporating Indigenous healing practices into her work provided Symone with a grounding framework to process the emotional weight of anti-racism efforts. These spaces offered tools for reflection, resilience and restoration — not just for herself, but for the communities she served. The healing practices became essential to sustaining her emotional labor and nurturing collective transformation.
Symone is intrinsically motivated by her ancestry, family and faith. “As I continue to learn about my ancestors and this fight that has been centuries old, I don’t have a choice but to do this,” she said. “My faith guides everything I do. Foundationally, love, compassion and empathy are at [the] core of who I am.” She found herself doing things that were difficult: “to hold relationships, forgive, empathy and more.”
“I am continually inspired to build relationships,” she said. Her approach is: “Do you understand me? Do I understand you? If not, how can we get there?”
What Is DEI?
DEI stands for diversity, equity, and inclusion, which are organizational frameworks aimed at promoting fair treatment and full participation of all individuals, especially those from historically underrepresented groups. These concepts focus on creating a diverse workforce, ensuring fairness in opportunities, and fostering an inclusive environment where everyone feels valued and respected.
Challenges: professional and personal
Doing social justice work at institutions of higher education has been “hard but really meaningful,” Symone said. She has encountered “antiquated resistance” based on people’s “lack of exposure.” Her work has been “to change the culture,” but she has found that “people are resistant to change.”
When Symone took the Intercultural Development Inventory last year, she found she was good at identifying things she had in common with others, but she wasn’t as adept at acknowledging differences, which could “cause conflict or challenge.” Yet it was important as a DEI practitioner to try to go “into the space of unknown, where conflict can happen.”
DEI work includes many different approaches. In a rural area, where some folks didn’t understand the “why” behind DEI work and were resistant to change, Symone talked about the way implicit bias could affect the brain and body. She helped people connect to what was going on in their bodies, understand it conceptually, and identify a path forward.
The need for restoration
Symone believes that the restorative element is vital. She focuses on “the need for repair” because, she says, “If I don’t do that, I will be very angry… and I am there right now. I can be very, very angry.”
“My goal was to try to restore and repair,” she explained. “My goal was, ‘You have orientations, understandings and beliefs that are different from mine. I choose to ask about it… to lean into curiosity instead of anger first.’ I tried to come from a place of curiosity. I feel like if I continue to go down a path of anger, I get further from restorative mending and healing and love, and then how else are we supposed to move forward? I don’t want division, to feel siloed, or for this to continue. So I approach from the lens of being restorative, even if [I] don’t feel like it. I feel like for humanity’s sake, we should do that.”
Symone is concerned that people may have lost the capacity for curiosity they had as children, which enables empathy for others. “Fundamentally as humans, there is no opportunity to ask questions and learn anymore,” she said. Nevertheless, she isn’t giving up. She sustains herself through her friends and community — people who genuinely ask about her well-being and give her space to be truly listened to without judgment. “Community is about being authentic and transparent,” she said. She also mentioned how valuable it is that her institution continues to support professional development experiences in this moment. It is important to “keep learning and being invested in as a person and a professional,” she said.
To learn about efforts to fight disinformation on DEI, explore the USC Race and Equity Center’s National DEI Defense Coalition’s information and resources.
Additional resources for learning about DEI:
