Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash
Photo by Cash Macanaya on Unsplash
The legend of John Henry — the Black steel-driver who raced a steam-powered drill during the Industrial Revolution and won, only to die from the effort — has long been read as a tragedy of human pride versus machine efficiency. But Jayson Council and Dax-Devlon Ross, two strategists who have spent decades at the intersection of equity work, organizational transformation, and cross-sector leadership, want to reframe it entirely.
“John Henry raged against the machine to his demise,” says Council, whose firm works across industries on leadership development and social impact. “What would it look like if he had the ability to rage with the machine? What if John Henry was somebody giving the inputs to the civil engineers — helping make the mechanism work flawlessly with humanity?”
That question is the beating heart of their new essay, John Henry for the AI Era: Raging With the Machine, a provocative reframe that argues the DEI work of the last decade — battered, politicized, and now largely dismantled in corporate America — may hold the very tools we need to survive what’s coming next.
The Invisible Connective Tissue
To understand Council and Ross’s thesis, you need to understand who they are — not as public intellectuals, but as what Ross calls “ecosystem utilities.” Both men work deep in the infrastructure of progressive organizations: voter protection groups, human rights organizations, immigration advocates, civil society builders. They are the people doing organizational culture work, values alignment, coaching, and long-range visioning for the people doing the visible work.
“Me and Jayson work with hundreds of organizations and you don’t have to hear our names all the time,” says Ross, who has written eight books and spent 30 years doing journalism alongside his strategy work. “That’s kind of the point.”
It’s precisely this vantage point — watching systems from the inside, across sectors, over decades — that allowed them to see a pattern emerging that most people are still missing: the backlash against DEI and the rise of AI are not separate phenomena.
“It is not by coincidence that the delegitimization of DEI is happening in conjunction with the rise of AI,” Ross argues. “What it allows is for us to not have a conversation about what those implications are — and how we’re actually thinking about them in the long term.”
Jayson Council, Head of Culture at the Gersch Agency
Jayson Council
The Battlefield Has Changed
For years, equity work centered on representation: who had a seat at the table, whose face was on the board, whose story was told. That framing, Council and Ross argue, was never the full picture — and its zero-sum optics ultimately made it vulnerable to political dismantling.
But AI changes the battlefield entirely. For the first time, technology is disrupting not just physical labor but cognitive labor — the lawyers, the analysts, the strategists, the writers. The white executive in rural West Virginia and the Black founder in Atlanta suddenly share a vulnerability they never had before: a machine that doesn’t inherently have their best interests at heart.
“When it becomes human to human, it’s always us versus them,” says Council. “But now, maybe for the first time, we can believe in ourselves — together.”
This is the core of what they’ve coined DEAI: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in AI. Not a rebrand, but a reorientation. The insight that the DEI lens — examining who is left out, who has power, whose worldview is embedded in systems — is exactly the lens needed to interrogate AI design, AI governance, and AI’s implications for human labor.
From Access to Architecture
Their essay identifies two distinct dimensions of AI equity. The first is what they call the “assistant gap” — the historic reality that cognitive leverage was radically unequal. CEOs had research teams, politicians had speechwriters, wealthy individuals had advisors. Everyone else worked alone. AI, they argue, disrupts that hierarchy by giving a first-generation college student with a laptop access to analytical capability that rivals what only elites once possessed. That is equity in action.
But access alone isn’t enough — and this is where the harder argument lives. The individuals best positioned to use AI responsibly, they write, are not those who rely on it blindly. They are those who bring cultural literacy, ethical grounding, and bias recognition to the tool. Qualities, they point out, that DEI spent a decade trying to build into organizations.
“Without them,” the essay states, “AI becomes a mirror of its training data — replicating historical inequities at scale. With them, AI becomes a multiplier of human insight.”
Ross takes this further with an observation that should give any thoughtful leader pause. Research by scholars like Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru has documented how facial recognition systems misidentify darker-skinned women at dramatically higher rates than lighter-skinned men. Credit algorithms have been shown to replicate historical lending bias. These are not optics problems. They are accuracy problems, harm problems — and they are what happens when equity is treated as a post-launch audit rather than an inception-level design principle.
Dax-Devlon Ross, Author and Principal at Dax-Dev, Inc.
Dax-Devlon Ross
The Wakanda Principle
In our conversation, we uncovered a cultural touchstone that might surprise some: Black Panther. Not as wish-fulfillment, but as a genuine model.
“Wakanda is an example of raging with the machine,” Council says. “There is equity infused into the machine.”
The fictional nation of Wakanda, in their reading, represents what it looks like when a culture’s deepest values and knowledge systems are woven into its most advanced technology — rather than extracted from it or ignored by it. It is the anti-John Henry: not a man running against progress, but a civilization that shapes progress in its own image.
This is the leadership challenge Ross and Council are issuing. And they make it pointed: whose worldview is embedded inside Claude, or inside GPT? What values are being encoded into the systems that will soon mediate hiring, credit, healthcare, and education for billions of people? And who gets to be part of that conversation?
“Ain’t nobody experts right now,” Ross says plainly. “This stuff just got here and we don’t even know how it’s really working. So why can’t the people who built an expertise in understanding disparities — in patterns of employment, housing, credit — why can’t that knowledge be useful here?”
The Leadership Imperative
Council and Ross are not techno-pessimists. Their essay was, notably, written in collaboration with AI. They use it. They coach others on how to use it. What they are resisting is the assumption that the conversation about who shapes AI belongs only to engineers and founders.
The leaders who will thrive in this era, they argue, will not be those who resist AI, nor those who adopt it blindly. They will be those who ask the harder question: What is our human value proposition? If AI can draft, analyze, and predict, then human leadership must double down on judgment, wisdom, context, and ethics.
“Right now we’re working with a platform and technology that has no sauce and no soul,” Council says, with characteristic directness. “What happens when it has sauce and soul? That’s what we’re trying to help connect.”
For Ross, the emotional stakes are personal — and the argument is ultimately a moral one. “People of color, folks — we have been coming up with brilliance that has been beneficial to this whole world forever. And there is no invitation, outside of that 10-year window, for that to be really respectfully honored.”
DEAI, in their vision, is the invitation — extended not just to those who have historically been excluded, but to everyone now facing a machine that doesn’t inherently know their worth.
“Raging with the machine,” they write, “means refusing both nostalgia and naïveté… and understanding that equity in the age of AI is not about who gets a seat at the table; it is about whether humanity remains at the head of it.”
John Henry picked up his hammer and won the race. The tragedy wasn’t that he competed. It was that no one thought to ask him to help design what came next. Council and Ross are asking that question now — before it’s too late to matter.
Jayson Council is a leadership strategist and co-founder of multiple cross-sector initiatives at the intersection of equity and innovation. Dax-Devlon Ross is a writer, educator, and organizational transformation strategist with eight books and 30 years of journalism. Their essay “John Henry for the AI Era: Raging With the Machine” is available now.