I don't like DEI and am willing to engage. The US has a huge disparity of outcomes along racial lines. This is a legacy of slavery as well as social and governmental discrimination following slavery. [Racial biases persist today, but are much better today than the past, and we should focus on elimination of those biases, not adding new ones.]
These factors result in real disparity in capabilities and merit today. This is precisely why racism was and is so detrimental.
I oppose DEI because I think it is racist, even if good intended. I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals, based on their individual actions and merit. I don't think that group statistic should be a higher priority than equality for individuals.
In my mind, DEI is a myopic obsession with the group statistics, to the detriment of individual equality.
If a school enroll someone with a 400 point lower sat over the higher person on the sole basis of their race, that is a major Injustice on the scale of individual humans, even if it moves some group statistic closer to equal.
I think countering racism with racism is a very dangerous game, likely to blow up in everyone's face.
Instead, equality under law should Ensure equal treatment moving forward. Past wrongs should be addressed by race blind improvements to economic mobility.
> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals...
One of the things I was told in my mandatory DEI training was that male job applicants will frequently apply for jobs even when they satisfy less than half of the required qualifications, but female job applicants rarely do. Additionally, language in the job description that hints at a stereotypical 'tech bro' culture can also be off-putting to female candidates. So just by being aware of these issues and paying attention to them when crafting your job posting, you can get a more representative distribution of applicants. You then evaluate those applicants on their actual merits.
But if you are scaring off half the population before they even get to the interview, you are greatly reducing the chances of hiring the best candidate, and certainly not treating the individuals equally.
That is just for gender, but I am certain you can find similar things for race.
Do you have a citation for that? I'm not saying it's necessarily wrong, or that employers couldn't do better with writing job postings. But I've found that a lot of corporate training content is total BS, often based on a single low-quality study that was never reproduced. When the results seem "truthy", people tend to believe without being sufficiently critical.
That sounds like a sexist stereotype to me. Men and women are the same in all the ways that matter, except for the small percentage of areas where we forget that and admit they act differently because it gives us an excuse to treat women better? Please.
What people usually argue is that men and women are the same in many ways but are often conditioned by society to act differently. That conditioning is what people are generally critical of and attempt to change via things like DEI.
> but are often conditioned by society to act differently
Mind expanding on this a bit?
> I think our laws and institutions should strive to be race blind and treat people equally, as individuals, based on their individual actions and merit.
That sounds nice, but that’s not what our laws and institutions are doing, nor is it the direction they’re moving in.
"If a school enroll someone with a 400 point lower sat over the higher person on the sole basis of their race, that is a major Injustice on the scale of individual humans, even if it moves some group statistic closer to equal."
So this is a hypothetical that is not worth discussing. Until specific cases can be brought to bear, why are you inventing situations that may never have existed?
I'd also like to opine on SAT scores for a second. First off, it's well known that SAT scores are not directly correlative in post-secondary educational success, nor work-success. Second they are not highly accurate measurements - there's an inherent fuzziness to them. So even if 2 students had a SAT within some Epsilon, the SAT scores might not really provide much differentiation there. Ergo, basing all of our policies on SAT scores - which are well known to be easily gamed, and also a product of a private institution - seems not a good idea.
Moving on, the problem with being against "myopic obsession with the group statistics" is you are ignoring some important evidence. What do you think of the "group statistics" that say that black people start less businesses, have less family wealth? Or black women have higher maternal mortality? These are pointing to important individual outcomes that are, to say the least, wrong.
So I don't think that paying attention to group statistics, like black maternal mortality (aka how many black moms die in child birth or due to child birth) is "myopic" and "to the detriment of individual equality." It's a very very real problem we, if we intend to call ourselves a moral society, need to solve. So having specific programs to help solve black maternal mortality in a hospital is not "countering racism with racism" imo. It's a focused program on solving a focused problem.
This logic extends out to most "DEI" things. For example is it good if the students at universities drift from representing America on average? I'd say it is not good. What about the ivy league pledges to make school free for anyone who's family income was under $X a year? Is that a myopic obsession with group statistics, namely poor people who can't afford elite colleges even if they were admitted? Seems like yes that could fit into your definition of why you oppose DEI. And IT IS a DEI program - it's increasing diversity (income/class diversity) and equality/equity (improving outcomes for individuals) and inclusions (including those who cannot afford elite colleges).
So when DEI programs that are focused on race, because much of our racial divide was artificially constructed by racist laws and policies of the past, it is suddenly bad, even though I rarely hear anti-DEI people go on about the low income scholarships for ivy leagues. Honestly it starts to sound that in fact many people may in fact have a problem not with the overall concept, but the beneficiaries of the programs.
So back to your comment, let's pick some specific circumstances that we know about and may you can propose how you'd meaningfully fix it, policy wise, within 5 years: - Black maternal mortality us 3x higher than white maternal mortality - Black people are ~ 14.4% of USA, but 12.5% in colleges. Is this a problem? - If we think talent is spread equally, then we should expect to see more % of black founders in YCombinator than the 2-4% there is. Maybe not exactly 14.4% but surely closer to 10% than 0%? Is this worthwhile of being solved? - While we are at it, only 11% of YCombinator founders are women. Is this a problem?
So what can be done about these noticeable gaps? What kinds of suboptimal outcomes are being picked when, for example, few YCombinator founders even know about the challenges and struggles of the average American? (who's a woman btw, women are 50.49% of the population, a majority) What kinds of products, opportunities, etc are being missed here? Maybe none?
What are your "race blind improvements" to economic mobility here? You have a 5 year timeline to make statistically meaningful changes to these metrics.
DEI is not a law. I get how this misunderstanding is possible given how wildly the term gets thrown about by conservatives, like it is a boogieman that is the source of everyone's problems.
Anyway, everyone is already ostensibly equal under the law, but, like you've recognized, we've still found our way into a system of racism (that goes beyond governmental discrimination). Logically, to recognize systemic racism, that folks are born into a disadvantage, then to say that these disadvantages must be ignored, is to exploit systemic racism. It does nothing to address the system. If anything, by making it an EO, it strengthens the system.
You call DEI countering racism with racism, but your only argument for this is getting mad at a hypothetical situation. To add, though, to recognize systemic racism and to then put so much weight on an SAT score, while standardized testing is known as being a component of systemic racism [0], is racist in and of itself.
0 - https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-begin...
With respect to education, I'm not attached to SAT scores. Pick any non racial metric of merit, and I'm OK with it. Income is fine, not a protected clause. Random is fine too. Just don't promote or penalize people based on race.
With respect to jobs, if you agree the most qualified person should get it, we are similarly aligned.
If you agree with all that, we are good, not matter what it is called.
I just call it non discrimination.
The problem as I see it is that hiring the most qualified person for the job often requires DEI. That's because one of the primary goals of DEI programs is to attempt to ensure that people in different groups have the opportunity to demonstrate that they are qualified. That could take the form of trying to account for differences in how groups communicate their qualifications (e.g. certain neurodivergent people are likely to struggle processes that put excessive weight on ability to make small talk), trying to account for differences in access to opportunities to demonstrate qualifications (e.g. by sending recruiters to historically black colleges), trying to account for alternative was that people might be qualified (e.g. by trying to recognize how someone with technical experience form the military might be qualified even without a degree), or trying to avoid recruitment practices that are likely to favor people in the same group as the interviewer (e.g. being careful of basing hiring on "culture fit").
I'm not sure this is terribly relevant given where the conversation has gone, but in your example, college admissions, race was essentially used as a tie breaker between equally qualified candidates.
I suspect that's how it ended up being used in a lot of places (aside from deliberate outreaches to encourage applications, etc).
Beyond that though, I'm not sure not getting into harvard is exactly a "grave injustice". You don't have a right or entitlement to go to harvard regardless of what your academic score is. And I don't think there's a reasonable argument that there should be such a right.
> race was essentially used as a tie breaker between equally qualified candidates.
That’s demonstrably untrue. At Harvard, an Asian candidate at the top decile of academic index scores had roughly the same admissions rate as a black candidate in the 4th decile: https://nypost.com/2023/06/29/supreme-court-affirmative-acti...
The candidates were basically competing in entirely different lanes based on race.
Then that's wrong, Harvard should not do it, and it would be good to try to create/enforce regulations that prevent them from doing it. However, that doesn't mean that all DEI efforts are bad.
There would be almost no black people at Harvard if they did not do it.
I have argued elsewhere that Harvard has no obligation to accept anyone. However, the civil Rights act does prevent discrimination based on race if they do.
The supreme Court case on the admissions topic showed extremely clearly that race was not just a tiebreaker.
Imo, the far more egregious use is public universities.
Similarly, if I run an organization, I can choose to serve 10 or 10,000. I just can't hang out a sign saying "no blacks/whites allowed".
What about Brown v. Board of Education? Do you think that Southern schools had an obligation to accept black students or did they not have to accept anyone at all? Do you think in 1900-1945 when Harvard Yale and Columbia were putting a quota on the number of Jewish students to limit their enrollment that was fine, as Harvard has no obligation to accept anyone, Jewish or otherwise?
I think you misunderstand what I wrote. Please reread it
DEI is just giving other people the chance to setup the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people in a white dominated society.
It isn't a law. It's just looking at history and going, "They'd probably be as successful if there was a pipeline for those folks to get there, since that pipeline doesn't exist we need to represent them to allow the pipeline to be built."
You also don't seem to fully know what DEI is. You assume it's specifically hiring less qualified people because of their skin color. That isn't what DEI is.
It isn't racism. It's just giving other people the same chance of success. Representation is important.
Anti-DEI is just white people, once again, being offended that someone else is getting equal treatment. Look at trans hate, same thing. Look at book bans, same thing. It's just white folks getting upset and being offended.
> the opportunity pipeline that already exists for white people
There is no opportunity pipeline for white people.
There is an opportunity pipeline for a small number of well connected, wealthy people who can get their kids into elite prep schools starting from kindergarten.
It's not open to working class white people.
Edit: that doesn't mean no working class white person can succeed. Just that the prep school, elite university, big corporation (or startup founder) "pipeline" - which certainly does exist - is for wealthy people.
That's where the idea of intersectionality comes in. A person who is white and poor might be worse off than someone who is black and rich; however, someone who is black and poor would likely be worse off than both of them.
That's also why DEI advocates generally don't advocate focusing exclusively on race. Instead they generally advocate that DEI focus on many factors such as race, wealth, disability, sexuality, gender, military service, etc.
I think that's a step in the right direction. I'd just take it one step further, consider all the factors of each person's life, and thus treat people as individuals and not as representatives of a few select groups. Intersectionality excludes too many factors as it focuses on just a few.
"Small number" is doing a lot of work. Just as an example: https://heller.brandeis.edu/news/items/releases/2023/impact-...
Quite a few "white people" got a start at accumulating property this way that was denied to "black people". Is it directly tied to going to college? No. Does it help? Probably.
My wife’s family is from a nearly all white coastal oregon county whose median household income is about the same as the national average household income for black people. Between two individuals with that same income level, the historical reasons why they ended up in that position are irrelevant. Neither person experienced those historical circumstances themselves. And regardless of path dependency, the result of that they’re on the same rung of the economic ladder today. There is no legitimate basis to help one of those people over the other.
And if you’re looking at path dependency, Asians should be the biggest beneficiaries of DEI. My dad was born in a third world village. He’d literally have been far better off going to school in the segregated south than taking a boat to school during monsoon season. I don’t think that should count in how you treat me—I grew up comfortably middle class—but it’s downright bizarre to say I’m somehow more privileged than people whose families have long been in America.
As others have said, that is now an economic advantage. There are other economic advantages. Why not level the economic playing field for everyone?
What if demanding leveling for everyone is a distraction so that it never gets leveled for anyone? Similar to now is not the time, thoughts and prayers, etc.
It also never seems to be a problem that businesses don't need everything leveled for all businesses. The PPP loans were all taken up by people with lawyers that could quickly jump on all the money, and didn't actually help many of the businesses that needed it.
Perhaps it is for some people, but I'm serious. I'd like to see the economic playing field leveled. I was pissed when I saw the Democrats use racism and sexism to sideline Bernie Sanders and real economic change. Remember "Bernie Bros"? Biden's "black firewall"?
DEI is a defense of classism.
> DEI is a defense of classism.
That seems like a pretty far-fetched claim.
You say you want to see the economic playing field leveled, does spending time and energy trying to tear down the existing DEI systems get you closer to that goal or farther away?
Closer. There are a lot of people who are happy to see classism continue if they can use their race or sex to get an advantage in that system. I don't believe economic equality has a chance until the Democrats abandon DEI.
What would an opportunity pipeline for white people look like? How would we detect one if it were to exist?
Why ask me? It was chneu who claimed it existed.
Edit: Yes, I made a bold assertion, based on the view from the working class and the many intelligent white people I know who were held back by not being wealthy or well-connected. For those outside the elite pipeline, it's an advantage not to be white.
If there's a pipeline I don't know about, I'd like to hear it. Point it out so more people can join the pipeline to success!
You claimed it didn't exist[1]. Presumably you had some criteria, found no evidence and then made a conclusion. What was your criteria?
1. A substantially different claim than "We have no evidence for its existence" or "We don't know that it exists".
I come from a working class background, if that’s what you can call two parents who have spent most of their life on welfare of various kinds. I along with many of my white friends are now high six figure earners.
I have no high school completion, no university education, no qualifications. So obviously it’s not as closed as you are pretending it is.
I guess we don't agree what DEI is. I'm against different criteria for people based on race. This is most apparent in school admissions and affirmative action.
I think it is a clear violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to have dual standards based on race.
Also, I don't appreciate you blatant racism putting all white people into a single stereotype, not do I think it is accurate
This seems to be mostly a discussion in good faith, so I'm going to engage. There is definitely some ambiguity around the definition, and that's because DEI isn't law. Particularly in the context of this discussion, different companies implement different policies. So when asking if it's essentially affirmative action, the answer is "it depends".
But to shift gears, I've seen good arguments on both sides here. It seems like (in this discussion), there is a fair amount of agreement that the root of the problem has to do with disadvantaged folks lacking the same opportunities due to historical factors. So that's a good starting point.
The crux of the issue seems to be whether the appropriate course of action is to level the playing field for individuals who are starting from a disadvantage. This can be described as "equal outcome" rather than "equal opportunity". There are pros and cons to both options, but to put a fine point on it, I'm just not aware of any actions that can be taken to effect "equal outcome" that don't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. I'd love to be proven wrong, though.
I think you are describing the situation well. I would put myself in the bucket of equal opportunity. I prefer addressing the causes, and think poverty is a better proxy for the core issue than skin color, and doesn't have the collateral damage.
A black and a white children of dirt poor single mothers are both going to have major headwinds in life.
A black and white children of married techies and doctors are both going to start with a good hand.
Addressing the problem at the college admission stage is just juicing the numbers in a way that says our University is care more about your skin color than what you can do.
It would be far better to look at what we can do to keep kids in school, stabilize their home lives, and make them into competitive college applicants.
This is the route to address equal outcome that doesn't result in unfair circumstances at the individual level. It's slower to show results, but I think it's the only thing they'll actually get there in the end.
If all we care about is the numbers, we could just give honorary diplomas to kids that can't even read and make the numbers work.
> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.
Take away affirmative action and any explicit race-based admissions and hiring programs and we’re still left with different criteria based on race. For example, it’s been shown that resumes with names perceived as “Black” get less attention than those with names perceived as “white”[1][2].
In another of your comments you acknowledged that such discrimination does still exist and that we should work to eliminate it. What does that mean? Educating people about it, right? Perhaps implementing a blind screening process?
Everywhere I’ve worked, such programs were part of the DEI group. Now, all of those programs are gone. How can we work to eliminate still-existing discrimination if we can’t even talk about it anymore?
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janicegassam/2024/04/17/new-res...
[2] https://www.nber.org/digest/sep03/employers-replies-racial-n...
I would 100% support blind screening and application where possible. Also educating recruiters and diversifying pipelines. My job had the latter, and I supported it.
What I don't approve of was my annual bonus depending hitting on targets for % minority hires. That shouldn't be on my mind when I'm interviewing candidates.
Blind hiring does not actually work, it's essentially Recruitment Theatre as a way of making you feel like the interview process is more fair when it's actually more discriminatory.
There's been studies on this effect where they've attempted to anonymous names, backgrounds and other personal details but it often has little effects or even an opposite effect. People are really good at finding accurate proxies for their bias unfortunately. And it only really works until you get to the actual interview phase which is a really small portion of the process.
So you end up with a recruitment pipeline that's racist but now in the opposite direction.
> I'm against different criteria for people based on race.
People keep saying this. It's such a nice and simple statement. "All men are created equal!". It's the details of real life where you tend to run into issues.
Are we allowed to measure what percentage of various races get to go to harvard? If we find an oddity can we correct it? How do you fix both the existing racial biases and the previous history of racial biases affecting people's positions?
Saying "racism is dead let's not worry about it" seems like a really convenient position to take. You don't have to actually do any work.
I addressed this above, I explicitly said it exists, but getting better. You help people break out of poverty and ensure they have actual merit. You don't establish separate requirements and treatment based on race.
So, like, those programs exist. People are trying to help others break out of poverty. But we happen to live in a nation where a specific group of people were denied advantages most/everyone else got, for a very long time, explicitly based on skin color.
Is trying to boost certain candidates based on skin color the best way to do it? Obviously not, in a perfect world we would have a more complex and accurate system. We don't live in a perfect world. And I'm betting 90% of the people who yell about "DEI" on the TV are not "concerned that this is an imperfect way of solving the problem".
This comes up a lot in these types of threads. It's fine to acknowledge someone might have identified an actual problem. It's theoretically possible for Trump to tell the truth, if only by accident, at least once. But there is a huge difference between agreeing that something might need to be fixed, and handing power to people who want to tear it all down.
There's, dunno what to call it, maybe naivety, in places like this, where you see, a certain attitude that's like "well <current solution> isn't perfect so lets get rid of it and then maybe someone will do it better next time".
There's a bunch of issues there, but the biggest one is that usually it took years and years and hundreds if not thousands of people's efforts to get the current solution in place and if you just tear it down, it'll take the same amount of effort if not more to get something else done.
Obviously some solutions do more harm than good and so the correct answer is to remove them. I'm unconvinced, say, harvard considering race as a factor when choosing people to admit is actually doing harm to anyone, much less so much harm that we need to have a culture war over it.
I think definition is definitely an issue in the debate. What you’re describing I knew as affirmative action. I’ve only understood DEI as being willing to hire from diverse backgrounds, implemented by posting job positions in diverse areas like HBCUs. I’ve not personally seen any examples of different criteria for different people. Is this actually documented as something companies with DEI initiatives were doing post affirmative action?
You can find a lot of this in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. At its most extreme an Asian Student and Black student with the exact same MCAT test score would have a 21% acceptance rate for the former and 80% acceptance rate for the latter. The lawsuit revealed the admissions office would use intangibles to discriminate, like giving Asian students low "Personality scores"
My bonus at a fortune 50 bay area firm was based (partially) on % minority hires. These were called "DEI Targets"
I've been told face to face by several tech recruiters that they are not looking to hire my race and gender, but I should tell my minority wife should apply.
Google "diversity quotas" or "hiring targets". If you are explicitly demanding a disproportionate number of minority candidates, you are disadvantaging other candidates.
That's the thing, DEI advocates generally don't advocate for diversity quotas or hiring targets and such practices are not common. For example, when I went through the DEI portion of interviewing training we were explicitly told that we were not allowed to hire people of a certain group in order to try to improve diversity.
The terms get lumped together by conservatives and then blamed for all evils. Defining it might help, but good luck with that.