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