Treating diversity as a checklist item

Treating diversity as a checklist item names the difference between representation as a meaningful change in power and representation as a visible, easily completed gesture. For Nella Rogers, that distinction is not abstract: it shapes her response to a demeaning fictional Black character, the conversations her predominantly white workplace cannot sustain, and the limits of being treated as an exception rather than as evidence of broader change. Wagner Books can announce that diversity matters; the harder question is whether its practices change who is hired, whose work is understood, and who is expected to explain what is missing.

Definition and Stakes

Nella encounters the checklist idea through Jesse Watson, a nationally known activist whose YouTube videos she follows alongside Malaika and more than a million other people. She does not agree with every argument he makes; his ninety-minute case against CP Time strikes her as excessive. But his criticism of well-meaning white people who make a point of presenting diversity gives her a way to articulate her distrust of the novel Needles and Pins. Jesse warns that heightened attention to cultural sensitivity can turn diversity into an item on a list, a shallow gesture with only one dimension. The problem is not simply that representation is absent. It is that the appearance of addressing it can substitute for the more difficult work of understanding and changing the conditions that produce exclusion.

The fictional Shartricia makes the distinction painfully concrete. Colin Franklin has written her as nineteen, pregnant with her fifth child, and unable to say whether the father is LaDarnell or DeMontraine because both men have left town. She curses and moans through her scenes, is isolated from her family and the few friends who are not addicted to opioids, and has a name linked to her mother’s supposed ignorance and a green dress worn when her water broke. Nella finds the naming detail both vexing and endearing, but the rest of the characterization feels demeaning: Shartricia’s voice seems to Nella to combine a caricature of a freed slave with a struggling Tyler Perry character. A Black character’s presence in a manuscript, then, does not by itself amount to meaningful diversity. The question is what kind of person the representation permits her to be—and whether an editor can raise that question without the critique being reduced to an accusation against the person receiving it.

Nella’s Position Inside Wagner

Nella’s difficulty speaking openly about Shartricia is sharpened by her place in the publishing house. She fears that criticizing Colin’s choices will be heard as calling him racist. Her colleagues’ responses to the prospect of hiring nonwhite employees confirm that fear: Kevin in digital marketing speaks indignantly about hiring unqualified people and waiting to see whether Richard Wagner changes his position. At the same time, colleagues treat Nella as the exception whose degree has made her qualified, as though her education has separated her from her Black identity. That exceptional status can spare her from being routinely asked to perform sensitivity reads, but it can also leave her isolated and make her presence seem like proof that the institution has already addressed the problem.

The contradiction is present from Nella’s first attempt to enter the industry. Before interviewing with Vera Parini, she worries about the hierarchy, homogeneity, and rigidity she expects in a Manhattan office. She chooses conservative clothes for the interview, including an old blue dress and stockings, while carrying a tote from the Nation’s booth at the Brooklyn Book Festival as a small expression of personality. Her qualifications also carry a connection: an editor who knew one of her University of Virginia professors helped her résumé. These details complicate any simple division between merit and access. Nella has earned her role, yet she knows that professional entry can depend on networks and that the workplace’s assumptions about who belongs are not neutral.

The Diversity Town Halls

The town halls begin after a viral shooting in rural North Carolina. An elderly Black man is killed by a white police officer after reports say he was reaching to turn up his hearing aid. Yang, the only other person of color Nella has worked with at Wagner, had quit six months after Nella joined to pursue a PhD; three days after Yang’s last day, the shooting takes place. Richard sends a rare company-wide email announcing a series of Diversity Town Halls. Nella prints it and pins it to her cubicle wall, encouraged that the company is asking employees to discuss an urgent issue that has particularly affected her.

At the first meeting, the participants cannot agree on what diversity at Wagner means. They ask whether it concerns employees, books, or authors, and point to a Black writer the company published the previous year. Nella tries to steer the discussion back toward the issue, but she hesitates to say that hiring based primarily on Ivy League degrees or personal connections narrows access: her own résumé benefited from a professor’s editorial contact. She also wants to distinguish publishing a Black author from publishing Black American authors. Wagner had published six Black writers before that example, but, as Nella understands it, none was Black American. The distinction matters to her, yet she does not feel equipped to unpack its implications in front of her white employers.

The second hour turns to role-play and word association. When Nella offers BIPOC as a term associated with diversity, colleagues suggest left-handedness, nearsightedness, and dyslexia; another person proposes being non-millennial. The exercise shifts attention away from the treatment of Black people inside and outside publishing. The moderator praises roughly one hundred attendees for being open, although everyone in the room is white except Nella. The structure of the meeting thus performs the problem it is supposed to address: a broad vocabulary of difference makes it possible to avoid the particular inequity that brought Nella there.

Attrition, Isolation, and Recurrence

The meetings lose participants in sequence. The first draws a large crowd; the next, held after the initial one, has half as many; later meetings draw fewer still. By the fourth, only Nella and a publicity assistant remain, and even Natalie from Human Resources has stopped attending, citing scheduling conflicts. When the assistant suggests offering donuts to attract people, Nella tears up the think piece she had planned to share and leaves. Her frustration is not only about one poorly run meeting. The proposed incentive makes attendance itself seem like the goal, while the substance of the discussion has already receded.

Nella later feels embarrassed by this public display of frustration, but the episode reveals the cost of being the only Black woman in the room. She has gradually befriended other assistants, and people of color at the front desk and in the mailroom know her by name; none of that provides the colleague she wants, someone with whom she can discuss an insensitive fictional character and return to work feeling understood. Her isolation is therefore not simply a matter of head count. It is the absence of a shared understanding that would make speaking candidly possible without turning Nella into the sole interpreter of race for her workplace.

That gap also appears in her relationship with Owen. When he reassures her that the trouble will blow over in five days, Nella points to the difference between his experience as a white cisgender man and hers. Wagner’s conduct may appear harmless to an outsider, she recognizes, but repeated exposure to small talk, assumptions about who performs service work, and microaggressions makes the office stressful. What looks minor from outside accumulates for the person required to live with it. The contrast helps explain why a checklist gesture cannot stand in for listening to the people who bear the consequences of the institution’s routines.

Significance

The concept recurs in the novel as a test of whether institutional inclusion has substance. Wagner can convene meetings, publish a Black author, or express concern about representation; each act may be visible without resolving who gets access, which communities are represented, or how Black people are portrayed. Nella’s own position embodies the tension: she has a job at the publisher, but the company can treat her as an exceptional individual while leaving its assumptions and practices largely intact. Even when Richard later offers her a role on a Jesse Watson project, he says Hazel-May McCall should have an opportunity too because Hazel introduced him to Jesse. The decision gives Hazel a stated claim to participation, but it also recalls how access and credit are negotiated through workplace relationships rather than settled by a general declaration of diversity.

The novel does not treat every attempt at inclusion as meaningless. Instead, it distinguishes commitment from its performance by showing what happens after the announcement: whether the conversation stays with the people most affected, whether representation is specific rather than interchangeable, and whether institutional attention continues once participation becomes inconvenient. In that sense, diversity as a checklist is not merely an inadequate phrase or meeting format. It is a way for an organization to appear responsive while leaving its difficult questions—and the burden of raising them—with the person it has already made exceptional.