Ethnic Studies and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion: A New Approach to the Bamboo Ceiling

The Year of Racial Social Justice Since 2020, both ethnic studies and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) 1 programs reaffirmed their value in society: movements toward racial social justice increased as direct responses to police violence and other forms of racial violence and hate.Organizations, institutions, and governments reacted with various measures to combat systemic racism in both the classroom and workforce while promoting practices rooted in equity and inclusion.It seems that many of today's social justice issues that exist within society (e.g., representation, access, etc.) are the same issues that were being challenged in the mid-twentieth century (Patton et al., 2019).As student movements from the mid-to-latter half of the twentieth century demanded fair and equal practices from their institutions of higher learning, universities were slow to meet their demands around 1. Numerous names and acronyms exist but, for the sake of clarity, given its relative ubiquity to other iterations rather than insistence, diversity, equity, and inclusion will be used for this paper.