Yep
Yep
As a colored dude, it's hard to explain. I've even had white folks say, "Nah man it's not like that."
The impact of centuries of slavery, segregation, and unequal treatment doesn't disappear quickly. Even if the root causes were completely resolved (and they are not), the consequences reverberate for a long time. We cannot forget that much of our life is a result of where we start, and it was the same for our parents, and their parents.
I feel like "DEI" is a bandaid to a bigger issue, that is: unequal opportunities due to schools that aren't properly funded (amongst many other things in a person's childhood).
If those issue are fixed, these "DEI" stuff wouldn't even need to exist.
Also:
I hate how people complain that Harris is somehow "DEI"
Like, isn't politicians supposed to represent the people? If they keep picking White Men, how are minorities supposed to feel like a part of the country? There were 45 presidents of which 44 were White Men, and this ticket of a Black Woman (Harris) + a White Man (Walz) somehow triggers people. 🙄 (Like who cares, vote for policy, not people)
Even if Harris was elected, Black Presidents wouldn't even represent 5% of all people who have been presidents. (2/46 = 4.34% vs the black population at 13%) Why they (conservatives) be complaining so much lol.
The country is a racist shithole, and more people than you might think are essentially closeted bigots, unless they think you're some ally, oh boy will they open up and it gets uncomfortable.
If they keep picking White Men, how are minorities supposed to feel like a part of the country?
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
I fully agree and in typical American fashion, affirmative action and DEI were just bandaids to quickly solve some of the effects of institutional discrimination, instead of solving it at the root.
Even I, as a very progressive person, don't like some DEI hires. But the actual problematic DEI hires are not talented people like Kamala Harris. They are connected incompetent people.
I think Clarence Thomas would be a good example. By most accounts he is the most corrupt and incompetent justice, who just happened to run in the right conservative circles.
In the business world, I also see quite a lot of well-connected incompetent people. It used to be white gulf buddies, now it tends to be the white sister-of, or the latina wife-of, the gulf buddy.
Maybe the Trump kids are the best example of DEI hires. Ivanka Trump, anyone?
But the actual problematic DEI hires are not talented people like Kamala Harris. They are connected incompetent people.
I argue that Harris isn't really that much of a "DEI Hire".
I mean, sure, you might argue she only got picked because of race and gender. But the purpose of politicians in a democratic system is to make people feel represented, not necessarily the "smartest" or "most experienced". Race and Gender absolutely matters. Like, if we keep having white men in the white house, that is a big "f you" to women and minorities. So picking Harris is absolutely essential to acknowledge the existence of Black people and Women. (And Harris isn't even some random person, she was qualified enough to be Attorney General of CA, and a Senator, merit definitely contributed to her getting picked)
Besides, the President (and Vice President) will have a lot of advisors to help them with the job, you don't need someone that's an Einstein to be President, just someone with overall good policy and some compassion, and can pick good cabinet members to run the country.
Thomas got in because of cronyism. He was the best conspirator available. He was also appointed by a Republican President who claimed he was the best qualified. Quite the opposite of token hiring. The party accused of using DEI to subvert a meritocracy opposed his appointment (Democrats).
So in summary, the GOP is projecting its failures onto Democrats again.
Diversity
Equity
InclusionIt's not "woke", no matter how hard they try to convince you of it! Diversity: Okay, yeah. If you're some close-minded person who's stayed in the same small town your whole life you might fear people who are different and not understand them. Literally part of what these initiatives are trying to improve, but whatever. However, the other two are basically just about fairness and making sure everyone has the chance to thrive! Nothing to fear there! Who could possibly be against that!?
To answer the last sentence: literally Nazis
Progress threatens the profoundly mediocre.
I mean the very simple answer they'll have to any point you make is "it's a lie told by <opposition> to get <what they want> unfairly and/or illegally."
Which is why earnest discussion is so difficult. Neither side can really trust that the other side to use words that match intent. I, for sure, don't trust anything a Right-leaning pundit says about their reasons for legislative positions.
As a white guy, I'd like to think it's not like that. I'd like to think that we left racism and all this bullshit in the past and any job goes to the best qualified applicant regardless of race, gender, or sexual preferences.
While I would like that to be true, I know that isn't the world we live in.
As a white guy, it is like that. In the same way it is in female run office spaces. But white guy culture is definitely the most toxic. They feel unashamedly deserving when they find good old boys clubs.
Having worked in a sexist office, it sucks, having worked for good old boys, it sucks. Not being able to call people out on their shit fucking sucks.
female run office spaces
The worst places I have worked at had female leadership and majority women employees. The gossip and bullying was off the scale. Older ladies harassing young men was a daily occurrence and laughed at.
Reminds me of this: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1168182/Catfights-handbags-tears-toilets-When-producer-launched-women-TV-company-thought-shed-kissed-goodbye-conflict-.html
It's the DailyMail, so take it with a wheelbarrow of salt, but it's what came to mind.
We're attracting the good trolls, I'm sorry that I have to lock it.
People lie about it in my experience. I work in government and in education. I've received our "DEI" training. I'm in the very heart of it, and all I've seen is that it's the exact thing that the people who complain about it say (sometimes) that they want instead. They (probably say but don't necessarily mean) that we should hire based on merit and not race. Well guess what? My dei training is watching a video where: some boss says "I don't want to hire Ahmed ", his subordinate says "but he's the best candidate" and his boss says "yeah but he's Indian" freeze frame, question on what you should do, play video saying to hire him if he's the most qualified guy.
Maybe your experience is different, but I'm in an organization that is what gets pointed to the hardest as "the problem" by these people, and I have seen what they describe. Maybe it's different for HR, but are you in our HR department, or have you just "heard about it"
But the ascent is something I've literally heard mentioned by white owners. When they hired their first non-white employee they made a point of mentioning how easy he was to understand.
People hire their friends and family anyway.
Just wait until Silicon Valley Google coders are all Indian foreign born making 35K/year living on the Google campus. DEI works both ways.
This misses the point entirely.
DEI is about finding the best candidate for the job, and paying them fair wages.
What you’re describing is literally anti-DEI. Musk and Trump have both been open about using the H-1B visa program to find foreign workers who will work cheaply, and they do it so that they don’t have to pay American workers a fair amount.
DEI is about finding the best candidate for the job, and paying them fair wages.
No it isn't. Its about finding the best PR pitch for the university you're recruiting in. Since American universities are going to shit, tech companies are moving abroad to hire cheaper (and often, frankly, better) developers overseas.
This creates a knock-on effect as well, since hiring is often part of a traditional march out to a select set of college campuses or by referral from existing employees. As Google/Meta/Amazon staff up with more and more East Indian workers, the networking effect sets in and future hiring fixates on the same places the last crop of hires came from.
The DEI line is just whitewashing for H1-B programs the tech sector already embraced. Now that its no longer in vogue, we're "Getting rid of DEI" to keep doing the H1-B programs that tech has embraced. Its all post-hoc PR rationalization.
Thats the thing- they're describing what will happen when DEI programs are dismantled.
This is the direction Google was heading anyway. More H1-B visas. More precarious employment for developers. More downward pressure on wages. Longer hours. Shittier living conditions. Eat the Bugs. Live in the Pod. Then spend your free time telling people to Like, Subscribe, and Share your 10 Neat Tricks on how they can make it all the way to the "coding goon for a defunct software company" proletariat high water mark.
The presence or absence of DEI was always just window dressing for shit these companies wanted to do anyway. DEI never really worked save as a means of shoving off the then-current administration's interrogation of Silicon Valley business practice. Now that the old Bidencrats are gone and the new Trumpocrats are in, its time to say "Actually all the Vivek Ramaswamy clones we're importing are part of the MAGA vision and they always have been".
I know that sociology is an elective in a lot of US colleges, and I thoughr more people would haveI taken it. It pretty straightforwardly explained that every aspect we hold inevitably drives our social interactions and life experience whether we like to or not. From what I've gathered from my friend's experiences and the attitutes I've seen onlone, the sentiment of "why does it matter to be X" is very much prevelant, and being on the receiving end of unknowing racism really does hurt.
But at the same time, understanding that point also means understanding that people who do not have your traits may not be able to fathom these sorts of experiences (though experience in general is hard to transfer) which results in a kind of dismissal. I'm not saying to forgive, but I understand, and it'll be all I think about as I help educate (and/or bulldoze disrespectful) people.
Many people beed tk realize the reality that a lot of the interactions we are seeing on mainstream social media platforms especially x/ twitter whatever the fuck its called now, is heavily manipulated by imperial actors such as the company team Jorge which is a mossad run bot farm out of israel that for a price (or even for free depending on the cause, floods platforms with fake engagement meant to make conservatism Look more popular than it truly is to manufacture consent and confuse/ wear down people attempting to dialogue and potentially even convince uninformed people consuming this state propaganda to support fascism/ conservatism.
One of my regrets about not having Twitter is that I don't know what's going on over there, which tbf is probably better for mental health, but it's better to listen in just cause information is power. Though, I must imagine it's just a damn stupid echo chamber (also tbf, all social media)
It's not always about racism. I preferred hiring people that I knew were good workers or were referred to me by people I trusted to have good judgement over someone who was maybe better on paper. An unfortunate side effect of that is my social circle early in my career was mostly other white people but I never rejected or thought less of someone because of their race. It was just that the places I worked always made it a pain in the ass to reopen a position when someone quit or was fired and I couldn't afford to gamble on an unknown. If no one was referred to me then whoever I hired was based off qualifications and how they interviewed. As I got older and met more people of different backgrounds those recommendations became more diverse.
All that being said DEI policies do solve the problem (other than the having to hire an unknown that would be hard to replace if they don't work out). It would be better for people to expand their social circle and meet more people on their own but I don't know how you would enforce that.
I preferred hiring people that I knew were good workers or were referred to me by people I trusted to have good judgement over someone who was maybe better on paper.
An unfortunate side effect of that is my social circle early in my career was mostly other white people.
Right, and your statement proves that individual racism isn't required for oppresion to exist, cuz you're pretty much defining systemic racism. Many white people don't know many POC because of deliberate, decades-long systemic segregation practices (e.g red-lining) that push us towards race-defined classes.
Yeah, agreed. That's what I was trying to get at with the last part of my comment. As time went on my circle widened and I got to know more diverse people the candidates getting recommended to me became more diverse. DEI, even the boogeyman version people like to complain about makes that happen much faster rather than organically.