Language is not neutral. Every word carries the fingerprints of power — who gets to define it, who gets to use it, and who gets erased when it’s misused. Few words illustrate this better than diversity and its adjective diverse. Since “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” became workplace gospel, these words have been stretched, twisted, and stripped of their meaning until they serve as a polite shorthand for “Black people” or “people of color.” What began as a call for representation and belonging has devolved into a euphemism that keeps whiteness centered while pretending to celebrate inclusion.

What “Diversity” Actually Means

According to any credible dictionary, diversity means “variety” or “the state of being composed of differing elements.” It describes the presence of people with different identities, backgrounds, and perspectives — race, gender, class, ability, religion, and more. To say a group is diverse is to say it includes a range of differences. No single person is diverse; only the group can be. The term doesn’t point to any particular race or identity — it simply means many kinds together.

Yet, in everyday conversation, you’ll hear sentences like:

“We need to hire more diverse candidates.”

“Let’s make sure we give voice to the diversity view point.”

“This magazine needs a diverse voice.”

What’s really being said is we need more Black or Brown people. “Diverse” has become a demographic label for everyone not white.

How the Word Got Hijacked

This linguistic drift didn’t happen by accident — it both reflects and maintains who holds power.  In a society where whiteness remains the default setting, the word diverse has become a marker for deviation from that norm. The power of language lies not just in what it describes, but in what it disguises. When words obscure who holds dominance, that dominance goes unchallenged. By using diverse as a polite stand-in for nonwhite, language itself becomes a tool of maintenance — it keeps white people from ever having to name whiteness, even as it defines the boundaries of inclusion.

Consider how the same word shifts meaning depending on who’s in the room:

If one Black woman joins a company of 500 white men, she’s often described as “the DEI hire,” the lone representative of “diversity.” Yet that company is never described as “majority white” — its racial composition remains linguistically invisible, because whiteness is assumed to be neutral.  But reverse the scenario: if one white man works among 499 Black women, that workplace is almost certainly described as “majority Black.” Suddenly race is visible — but only because whiteness is absent. The pivot point isn’t the numbers, it’s who is treated as the norm.

This distortion of language is not benign; it’s strategic.

By cloaking whiteness in neutrality, the word diverse performs a kind of linguistic camouflage — one that hides power behind the illusion of inclusion. When diverse comes to mean “not white,” and “lack of diversity” comes to mean “too many white people,” we reveal how thoroughly language has been recruited into protecting hierarchy. Whiteness remains the invisible baseline, the unspoken “normal” against which all others are measured — and, by avoiding the word white altogether, institutions maintain power through polite silence.

The Racial Logic Hiding Beneath Neutral Language

When people say, “We need a diverse perspective,” what they often mean is “We need a non-white perspective.” That framing implies that white people have no race — they are simply the baseline. This is how language reproduces structural racism: whiteness stays invisible but central, while everyone else is visible only as “diversity.” “Neutral” spaces — whether a newsroom, a university, or a boardroom — are assumed to be racially neutral when they are in fact white spaces. “Diverse voices” means everyone else. The quiet assumption is that white equals universal. And when “diversity” becomes a checkbox, it lets institutions celebrate inclusion without changing power structures. The token “diverse hire” becomes proof that racism is over — until that same person names injustice and is labeled “divisive.”

The Word “Ethnic” Plays the Same Trick

The same distortion infects the word ethnic. At its core, ethnic refers to cultural identity — shared language, heritage, or national origin. Every human being is ethnic. But in American usage, ethnic has become code for “not white,” just as diverse has.

Example: When I proposed hiring a soul food restaurant for a university event, the white male manager told me “ethnic food wouldn’t be appropriate.” I told him, “All food is ethnic food. What we call ‘Chinese food’ here is just called ‘food’ in China.” His comment revealed how ethnic functions as a stand-in for “foreign,” “spicy,” or “non-white.” Fried chicken and greens were “ethnic”; lasagna and quiche were “normal.” The logic is the same: white culture is the standard; everything else is variation.

“Ethnic” doesn’t mean non-white. “Diverse” doesn’t mean Black. These words reveal who we see as normal — and who we see as other.

Why This Matters

This isn’t about semantics — it’s about structure. When diverse is used to mean “non-white,” it reinforces the racial hierarchy DEI was supposed to challenge. It lets white institutions talk about inclusion without ever saying white. Even well-meaning organizations fall into this trap. A university might boast about its “diverse faculty” after hiring a handful of professors of color while keeping pay inequities and tenure barriers intact. A company might celebrate “Diversity Day” while every executive remains white. The word becomes a marketing tool instead of a measure of justice. True diversity includes white people — but not only white people. A racially diverse group includes everyone. A culturally diverse menu includes meatloaf and jerk chicken. A genuinely inclusive space values difference without treating any one identity as the yardstick of all others.

Reclaiming Precision and Accountability

If we want language to serve justice, we must speak with precision. Stop saying diverse when you mean Black, Latino, Asian, or Indigenous. Say what you mean. If a newsroom wants more Black writers, say that. If a company wants more Latino engineers or more women in leadership, name it. Ambiguity protects power; clarity exposes it. We should also challenge the assumption that whiteness has no culture. White people do have ethnicity — Irish, Italian, Polish, Armenian, Appalachian, Jewish, and so on. Forgetting that is part of how whiteness maintains its invisibility. Reclaiming those roots could help dismantle this false hierarchy by reminding everyone that ethnicity is universal.

The Bottom Line

And of course, we started with the

Brits and we conquered their king!

The next time someone says, “We’re looking for diverse candidates,” ask: “Diverse from what?” That question gets to the heart of the matter. Diversity does not mean Black. Ethnic does not mean non-white. These words should describe the richness of our shared humanity — not serve as polite cover for racial hierarchy. Language is power. Until we stop letting it disguise inequality, we’ll keep mistaking representation for transformation — and inclusion for justice.

White American Is an Ethnicity Too

To say “White American” is not an ethnicity is to deny both history and culture. It’s to act as though whiteness is a vacuum — a lack of identity rather than a constructed one. But the truth is that White Americans, as a group, do have an ethnicity. It may not be rooted in a single ancestral homeland, but it is every bit as culturally specific as being African American, Latino American, or Asian American. It has its own foods, its own music, its own traditions, and its own myths of origin. The refusal to name it as such is what allows whiteness to pass as the invisible norm.

When millions of Europeans arrived in the United States, they didn’t come as a monolith. They came as Germans, Italians, Scots-Irish, Poles, Armenians, and Jews — groups with distinct languages, religions, and folkways. Over time, and especially after World War II, those differences were sanded down into a new identity: “White.” This was not a natural evolution; it was a political one. Whiteness became the passport to full citizenship, social mobility, and safety. To become “White American” meant adopting a shared culture — not of old-country customs, but of suburban aspiration, Protestant work ethic, and patriotic myth. It was reinforced through media, education, and law.

White American culture includes foods like hot dogs and hamburgers at cookouts, Thanksgiving turkey with stuffing, casseroles made from canned soup, and regional barbecue traditions. It includes music such as country, folk, classic rock, and bluegrass — genres deeply rooted in the European-American experience and hybridized with Black musical innovation. It includes rituals like the Fourth of July, tailgating, trick-or-treating, prom, and graduation ceremonies — all cultural practices born primarily in white spaces before becoming national traditions.

The argument that whiteness has “no culture” is both naive and convenient. It lets those who benefit from the dominant culture believe they are cultureless — just “normal.” But culture isn’t defined by whether it feels distinctive; it’s defined by what people collectively do, value, and pass down. In other words, “White American” is not an absence of ethnicity; it’s the dominant one.

The problem isn’t that White Americans have no culture — it’s that their culture has been allowed to masquerade as cultureless, as just “the American way.” This invisibility is precisely what gives it power. When something is seen as universal, it becomes the standard against which all other cultures are measured. Calling fried chicken “ethnic” but not a turkey sandwich, or describing a Black author as “diverse” but a white one as “mainstream,” reinforces that hierarchy. White American culture has been so normalized that it’s mistaken for the default — the water everyone else must swim in.

Recognizing “White American” as an ethnicity helps dismantle the illusion that whiteness is neutral or cultureless. It puts white people back on the cultural map — not to center them again, but to make them visible, accountable, and real. Only when whiteness stops pretending to be invisible can true diversity — meaning variety in all directions — begin to exist.