Soon after being recruited by The Washington Post in 1992, reporter Michelle Singletary asked the newspaper’s business editor if she was hired because she was Black. Then 29 years old, Singletary had come to the job with years of reporting experience. Yet she repeatedly found herself justifying her qualifications to her colleagues. When the editor told her that her race was indeed a reason for hiring her, he confirmed her worst fears. “So, the newsroom colleagues probing how I came to get the job so fast were right after all,” she told herself, fighting back tears.

I am not Black and, as a university professor and an academic leader, I have not spent a day in a newsroom. But Singletary’s story sounds painfully familiar to me. Born and raised in India, I moved to the United States to earn my doctorate and then immigrated to Canada, joining its “visible minority.” In my three-decade professional journey, I have heard many talented people I have recruited ask the same question as Singletary: Was I hired for my talent, or to check a box?

These experiences are examples of what can be called diversity-as-deficit thinking—the negative conceptualization of people, tokenized for their identity, which results in the systemic reduction of their full dignity, worth, and skills to their “diversity.” In this article, I examine the impact of deficit thinking on employees from underrepresented groups, how that inhibits their sense of belonging, and explore possible pathways to foster such belonging. I use the term “underrepresented” to refer to Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), but the experiences are not uncommon across other marginalized groups.

Read the full article about deficit thinking by Ananya Mukherjee Reed at Stanford Social Innovation Review.