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We’ve been studying corporate diversity programs for decades. We were first drawn to the subject by the promise that employers could level the playing field. We saw managers copying the diversity initiatives of industry leaders, convinced that these programs would make corporate America a better place—a place where anyone could build the career they dreamed of, regardless of gender, race, ethnicity, or anything else that might have unfairly kept them from succeeding in the workforce. To understand what companies are doing to promote diversity and inclusion, we started by interviewing managers in all sorts of workplaces. They often talked of their new programs with pride. CEOs would tell us that the new harassment reporting system would put problematic staffers on notice that the firm was taking a hard line and that they would pay a price if they kept it up. Human resources VPs would explain that the new racial bias training would make bigots admit to themselves that they had a problem, and they would change their ways. Like a family intervention for a drug addict, we heard, training would make them aware that their behavior hurt others. We mostly interviewed chief executives, HR managers, and diversity managers who were putting these programs into place. But in our travels we talked with plenty of other people. Airplane seatmates would ask where we were going, or what we did for a living. When they heard that we were studying diversity programs, the dam sometimes broke. People who thought they were being targeted by racial awareness training, or harassment reporting systems, were less enthusiastic than the people who were putting those things into place. To put it mildly. White seatmates told us of trainers who had accused them, flat out, of being racist. That might start a rant about how their church is welcoming to all, or how they attended an integrated school, or how they had volunteered for Habitat for Humanity. And the trainer had the nerve to call them a racist, they’d say, knowing not the first thing about their history. Men would tell us that the new harassment reporting system put everyone on edge. One mentioned a friend who was called into HR over some stupid misunderstanding and lost a promotion because of it. Another said that his work team had created a separate email group, without women, just to make sure that no one was offended by a stray remark. Many claimed that their company used to be a terrific place to work because it was dynamic and fun and the team worked like a well-oiled machine. Now, concerns about discrimination and harassment, blown out of all proportion, had cast a pall over everything.