I'm Elise Hugh and you're listening to TED Talks Daily. Corporate diversity programs.

If you work for a mid to large-sized company, your office probably has one. But are they working?

Legal scholar Joan C. Williams calls them a failure and her 2020 TEDx Mile High Talk lays out why these programs don't live up to their

lofty goals. By the end, you'll learn ways to interrupt our biases to make diversity programs

actually work. In 2018, two black men went to a Starbucks to wait for a business associate.

But when they asked to use the bathroom, the manager ordered them to leave.

They refused. He called the police. And the video went viral.

Amidst an avalanche of bad publicity, Starbucks closed all stores across the country for four hours of diversity training.

And so baristas were handed workbooks with prompts like, what makes me, me, and you, you, and understanding our bias from colorblind to color brave.

This made newspapers across the country, and arguably that was the goal.

Look, everyone, we're solving our diversity problem.

The assumption, though, was that you could address structural racism

with an earnest conversation about our feelings. My take, give me a break, to address structural

racism, you need to change structures. So in the aftermath of George Floyd's death,

my sense is that many companies are feeling pressure to actually deliver on their diversity goals,

but they haven't a clue what to do. And that's because we spent probably close to a

billion dollars on diversity, but the basic tools of the diversity industrial complex, they just

don't work. A one-shot bias training, it doesn't work for a really simple reason. Doing anything

once won't change a company's culture. And the other basic tools, things like an employee

resource group or a woman's initiative, they're fine if the problem is with the women and the people of color,

but it's not.

If a company faces challenges surrounding diversity, typically it's because subtle and not so subtle forms of bias

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