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.