This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.
> This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes.
Could you inform Kamala Harris? She just ran a campaign which was largely predicated on the need for "equity", the goal of which she repeatedly described as meaning we need to take proactive measures to ensure that "we all wind up at the same place".
Yes? You're presenting this as some kind of gotcha but isn't that what the ultimate goal is?
I mean there's multiple ways to go about it; one that a lot of people object to is e.g. giving people jobs they're not qualified for. But another that I myself benefited from was a government that paid for everyone's education from elementary to university level, allowing me to go from a blue collar lower class to a comfortable middle class income level.
Good for you for being able to use the system to you advantage. Parent has a point though. DEI goals kept moving and changing along with the language in ridiculous direction. Question of the expected future state is very much relevant here. Note that we may disagree on what is acceptable future state.
I was surprised when you said "just ran a campaign largely predicated" because that wasn't how I saw her campaign. And this tweet is from 2020, not 2024, so it doesn't really prove your point. Trump and his MAGA friends might have framed it that way, but I need better evidence to believe what you are asserting. It might be that this proves you didn't pay attention to what she was saying and paid attention to what others said about her?
Why is make America great again so offensive? For African-Americans, the wealthiest they ever were was during the reconstruction era in the 1870s. That was because after the war, there was a shortage of skilled laborers and so they were in great demand. So this, Misnomer that make America great again is racist makes no sense. Good people don’t teach you to hate other people, remember that. You can’t do the same thing evil people do without becoming the thing that you hate. Morality is not relative. Morality is not Machiavellian
>That's the rhetoric of both sides though, isn't it?
yes, thats why I chose it.
I think the point slipped past, we started with you saying MAGA is innocent.
I pointed out that words have context. I gave an example of innocent words, which can be used by bad people, to sound just.
MAGA, is in this category.
Its not considered innocent, and most people will assume that you are being false or misleading when you say "i dont know why this is bad".
Its kinda like showing a Man U flag in an Arsenal town - its impolite. One is expected to have the awareness of how their team is behaving and perceived.
I mean, its your team, of course you should know everything about it, from its good PR to its bad PR.
the issue is that the other side applied a context to it that is not the same context people who created it mean. So you’re taking your own interpretation applying it to somebody else’s saying and turning it into a negative thing even though that’s not what they mean by it. And then you are lambasting them for your own negative connotation applied to what they think is a positive thing.
You're implying Black Americans should be thankful to return to an era where they were slightly wealthier, but had fewer rights, fewer protections and enormous, normalization, socially acceptable discrimination.
No, I’m simply stating that the phrase make America great again is not racist in and of itself. I don’t think it’s debatable that American education and test scores have decreased significantly compared to other countries. When applied in that context to make America great again at educating then there’s no racial context. People are reading what they want to see into the message or more specifically what they want to denigrate
The challenge is that only some "historical inequalities" reduce to skin color, so it becomes easy to start favoring certain "historical inequalities" over others because of their political salience rather than their severity, intensity, extent, impact, etc. And that can very easily start to look like a kind of racism itself.
A rich person descendant of slaves is very clearly advantaged against a poor person descendant of slave owners. This is so evident that even those thinking that the "historical inequalities" are the important bit can't help themselves but turn to money at every step of the way to fix then.
You can't really measure any of them in an indisputable and quantitative way, can you? That's kind of the point!
But we all know that there are innumerable stories of families and cultures that have suffered, struggled, been exploited, been abused, and been excluded for generations or centuries in ways that they still are deeply disadvantaged for today.
Who might see more impact from more opportunity though:
* the poverty-raised first-generation-collegiate grandchild of a Russian refugee whose family history is just hundreds of years of serfdom followed immediately by Soviet oppression
* the Stanford alum son of a middle class Chinese immigrant who came here to run a thriving import/export business
They both face structured disadvantages compared to some other people, but skin color doesn't do a good job of telling you where a helping hand might contribute to the more equitable future or which will add more diversity of perspective/culture to a workplace.
Programs like DEI often assume all PoC as similarly disadvantaged, and then contrast them against an archetype of an uncommonly successful and priveleged imaginary WASP. But the reality of history and equity involves far more dimensions and many more fine distinctions.
If you meet a Chinese person can you tell if they are from a minority group that was enslaved in Vietnam as recently as the 70s, or an upper class Han family?
What’s more true is that people around the world are facing adversity of extreme severity, but due to proximity and cultural barriers we don’t hear about them.
And if you don’t care about these other forms of identity and mistreatment , then you are really saying DEI is a repayment for a particular historical wrong doing, and not an effort for greater empathy, fairness, or new ideas.
All the Fox News criticisms suddenly become relevant: which descendants were actually impacted, how much do we owe them. Let’s pay it off and stop talking about it.
I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not what we are trying to achieve.
It is not the job of DEI in the United States to address worldwide historical systemic discrimination of inequality. Globally, DEI would be concerned with this, but not specifically in the USA.
The purpose of it within the USA is to address historical systemic discrimination within the USA, which certainly go beyond merely African slaves and their descendants but do not extend to discriminatory patterns in SE Asia.
That simplifies the objectives of DEI, but it makes for scenarios that are profoundly unjust. One of my college class mates grew up in rural Vietnam, and didn't have electricity until middle school. That classmate is categorized as "Negatively Diverse" according to the company's DEI policy. Even more undesirable than whites. I, on the other hand, had a dad that went to an ivy league university and accrued an eight figure estate before his passing. My sister and I had college and private school paid for. Yet we're categorized as "diverse" taking priority over the vast majority of candidates, most of them vastly less privileged than us.
The logical conclusion is the approach taken for native Americans, providing each tribe payments at certain ages, special programs, and scholarships.
The outcomes haven’t been great, but not due to lack of opportunity. It’s as much money and DEI programs can fix. Fixing lives requires solutions that don’t scale.
Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different.
I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
Many people alive today have parents that went to segregated schools in America. But my dad went to a school without walls in a Bangladeshi village. That’s almost certainly worse in terms of objective educational quality. But why does that path dependence mater anyway?
> Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
Because Black people are jailed at far higher rates than white people. The poor white potsmoker in Appalachia is likely to get a pass from the police while the Black man gets jailed for 10 years and sentenced to forced labor for pennies.
What factors were controlled for that led you to the conclusion that is racism? E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia. What about non-marijuana criminal records? A person is more likely to be charged with marijuana possession if they have other crimes on their record. What about age? The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44. People of all races in the 18-35 demographic are more likely to be charged and convicted, because that’s when male criminal behavior peaks.
Race-related factoids in ACLU reports should be viewed with skepticism. It’s made-for-litigation advocacy, not science. People of different races differ on many other dimensions and it’s easy to cherry pick results for advocacy reasons.
For example, I was interested in this notion of a “bamboo ceiling”—the idea that Asians are underrepresented in management or as corporate directors. Turns out that effect disappears when you account for age (the median Asian is 36), language proficiency (most Asian Americans are foreign born, and only 57% of those are proficient in english).
> E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia.
Why do you think that is?
> The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44
Why do you think that is? In fact, why do you think Black people have overall lower life expectancy than white people?
> People of all races in the 18-35 demographic are more likely to be charged and convicted, because that’s when male criminal behavior peaks.
Black youths are anywhere from 3x to 4x more likely to be thrown into juvenile facilities which has further downstream effects on incarceration as an adult. Why do you think that is?
You said:
>I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia?
And I'm telling you, directly and upfront, why it matters. You started off the argument by saying why does it matter where you were born poor. You have chosen to try and shift away from the argument when I brought up why it matters. The persistent effects of past bad acts is why it matters where you were born and of what skin color.
>> E.g. what about density—black people are more likely to live in urban areas where policing is more intensive than in Appalachia.
> Why do you think that is?
The incarceration rate for Appalachian whites is four times higher than the incarceration rate for Massachusetts whites. Why do you think that is?
> >The median black person is 32. The median white person is more than a decade older, at 44
> Why do you think that is? In fact, why do you think Black people have overall lower life expectancy than white people?
Asian Americans have a life expectancy at birth of 84.5. Whites are at 77.5, and black Americans are at 72.8. So the Asian-white gap is bigger than the white-black gap. Why do you think that is?
> Black youths are anywhere from 3x to 4x more likely to be thrown into juvenile facilities which has further downstream effects on incarceration as an adult. Why do you think that is?
The black/white incarceration disparity (2.3x) is smaller than the white/asian incarceration disparity (2.6x). Why do you think that is?
> You started off the argument by saying why does it matter where you were born poor.
No, I asked why it matters why you were born where you were born. 62% of black people have a household income of $40,000 or below versus 40% of white people. As to that 62% and 40% who are in similar circumstances, why should it matter what historical facts led them to those circumstances?
Hmm. I think you suffer from the illusion that your shell does not influence your behavior. Even if we are the same species, the genetic baggage, expression of that baggage and how we react to it cannot simply be ignored as not 'fundamentally different' partially, because genetic makeup is very much part of the foundation.
We are not all the same. It is silly to suggest that. We share common form factor and there are things that bring us together, but pretending otherwise is how we end up where we are now.
Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary. Measure stuff you have an opportunity to see without human bias or algorithms that are easily gamed? Measure, what is a desirable outcome?
As someone who's been looking for a job that will take a chance on how I can grow to full their needs rather than already being a perfect match; I would really love someplace that had a 'career pivot' entry track and not just a recent / about to grad track.
Maybe something like a 1 week, then 1 month (3 more weeks), then 3 months (total), then every 3rd month evaluation track for working the job in a 'temp to hire' sense with a 1 year cutoff so they can't just keep hiring 'perma temps' like in the past.
I understand there's risks, and I understand it's very hard for both sides. However there's a ton of untapped potential and corporations are the ones who aren't offering a way of tapping it.
> Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary.
Ivy League schools in the US have been doing this for rather a long time now. Whether they are any good at it is subject to significant debate, but they certainly like to pretend that they can evaluate it. Their evaluations tend to show a strong belief in the hereditary properties of "potential", which is not well established in actual objective research.
Most tests for potential are easily gamed by people who are taught how to pass the test, or simply avoided by people whose wealth and social status allows them to avoid the test.
For example: When I was 18 I was completely overlooked by the NFL because I had never played gridiron football. Had I been coached professionally for 10 years I may have been a star.
I sat in an interview for an army officer scholarship once, acutely aware that the man testing me had an accent that made it clear he was from a higher social class than me. He mentioned that I was not properly prepared for the meeting, but I was given no notes as to what to prepare. I was told later that in the private schools that feed the majority of candidates to this route, that they coach their pupils specifically for this test.
So I would like to hear a test for potential that is not easily gamed by wealthy people
> That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place
Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means doesn't mean no one has defined it. This comment reminds me of the people who complain "the mainstream media isn't talking about XYZ" when they are, in fact, talking a lot about XYZ, but the complainant is only reading Facebook articles shared by their friends.
> Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means
I also didn't bother to look up the meanings of equality, fairness or diversity. But those words are fairly straightforward and one learns them when one learns English.
"Equity" is one where the implied usage in corporate settings is pretty confusing given the standard meaning (see next para) of that word. So if my corporate bosses and HR are going to use that word, it is on them to educate and address the confusion of the audience.
Dictionary definitions of equity: "the quality of being fair and impartial", "the value of the shares issued by a company". Assuming it's the former, what does my HR even mean when they say we should be "fair and impartial"? On the one hand, that's a given, like saying "we should obey all the laws". On the other hand, if we are not being fair and impartial, then HR should lay out specific ways in which we are not and also the specific remedies.
It’s the government’s job to make the playing field equal, it’s not the government’s job to make sure everybody ties. The fact that you don’t recognize that they swap the word equality for equity means that you’re missing something.. It wasn’t by accident.
It doesn’t make you like some sort of prodigal genius to cite some Marxist garbage and pretend like yeah if we only did it right this 270th time it’d be perfect. Like you think you can do it better than stalin, huh? And even if you could, what makes you think someone wouldn’t take you out.
You can never have equity because people will never work equal equally as hard. That is a fundamental fact of humanity.
The gaslighting from the DEI types is unrelenting.
I've been in the corporate DEI training courses. I've read the CRT papers and books that are the influences of the DEI types. They all define equity as EQUAL OUTCOMES not equal opportunity. And they all say that the ONLY reason why we don't get equal outcomes now is because of structural -isms.
There is NO concept of individual merit in the source materials that lead to DEI ideas because DEI/CRT are offshoots of 'critical theories' which are related to our favorite communism/Marxist ideologies. This is not hyperbole.
(Mark Cuban is absolutely wrong the way he describes DEI vs what the proponents are really demanding in case that's where you got your idea about DEI from.)
But at the same time, it's true that most companies use DEI for marketing and conveniently ignore the equity part because it would lay bare their hypocrisy when their CEO gets paid $50 million a year.
> It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
You can recognize this without accepting that an infrastructure of explicit racial discrimination is a good idea. Many, many people seem to miss this point.
You measure how many people with different backgrounds (measured by a variety of metrics) gain entry to the pipelines that are recognized as the most common ways to gain power, wealth and prestige in a society.
You don't require that they all actually gain power, wealth and prestige (since that measures something else, which could be equally important or not, depending on your perspective).
If the only way to become a SCOTUS justice is to get into one of 2 or 3 law schools, and only people with a narrowly defined profile ever get into such schools, you pretty clearly do not have equality of opportunity. You can establish this even though in reality almost nobody ever becomes a SCOTUS justice.
Let's say you have a company in Warsaw full of lovely people who want what's best for the company. They have an opening for an infrastructure engineer and need somebody with particular skills, but are willing to interview candidates who don't have those skills but show aptitude , interest and a willingness to learn. They throw the doors open wide and interview everybody who applies. They only get white males applying for the job.
If they're measuring the diversity and inclusion of the pipeline, they'll still end up failing. Warsaw (one of the most diverse Polish cities) doesn't have a significant black population. They might get a handful of Chinese or Vietnamese applicants. The bulk of the "foreign" population are Ukrainian (by a wide margin) followed by European.
The trouble with any metric used to prove DEI credentials is that the org starts changing behaviour to boost that metric.
Perhaps the metric should be aligned with availability. No idea how that would work in practice though.
Well the first thing to do would to acknowledge that the responsibility for representation in a given workforce roughly matching that of the broader population does not fall solely on the shoulders of "a company in Warsaw".
The second thing to do would be to ask why only white makes are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that. That might involve some changes at the company, but more likely would require changes in the broader society.
The third thing to do would be to note that essentially no serious advocate of DEI goes beyond the idea that an ideal scenario is on average having work place representation roughly match the distribution in some broader social unit. If you have 0% black people in that broader social unit, nobody but people trying to ridicule DEI would suggest that you need to work towards more black people.
The criteria for what characteristics are considered by DEI efforts in a given context will vary. Gender, religion, "race", language, age ... these are others are all valid things that you might want to try to even up in workplaces to match the broader social context.
> The second thing to do would be to ask why only white males are applying, and consider what (if anything) might be done to alter that.
But this is exactly what I mean. You can try to make the job and the company sound appealing to females and minorities. But let's say 99.9% of the population around you is white and you just don't happen to get any female candidates applying because the number of females with those skills that are currently looking for work in your area happens to be zero. You could do a bunch of footwork and ask lots of "why". But if your small-to-medium sized company chiefly want to execute on a specific business goal, their focus will be on shipping product, beating the competition, keeping customers and employees happy. Who has pockets deep enough to fix some broader societal problem? How much of the budget should they spend on that? Is it even their obligation? What do the investors think?
This type of wider social problem should be tackled and funded by government: any department with a role in employment, equality etc. Responsibility for social issues cannot be left to private, profit-driven companies.
> ... the responsibility for representation in a given workforce roughly matching that of the broader population does not fall solely on the shoulders of "a company in Warsaw".
This is the actual test to get into firefighter training in California.[1]
This is just to get into training. Graduating is tougher.
Eight test events in 10 minutes 20 seconds. All events must be passed. No breaks.
Candidates wear 50 pounds of weight through the whole test. Plus an additional 25 pounds for the stair climb. The events are all firefighting-related.
Here's a woman firefighter passing this test.[2] With two minutes to spare.
> This is how you get 100lb women in the fire department who can't even control a fire hose at full pressure.
\1 Is this a real problem in actual fire deployments or simply a made up bit of Fox News DEI outrage?
\2 Here in the Western Australian rural bush fire service 100lb women and people in wheelchairs are valuable members that operate GIS terminals, coordinate aircraft, work as administrators and bookkeepers, etc.
It is a thing that happens and it also includes small women (and sometimes men) who aren't able to carry the weight they should be able to.
It is verifiable fact that the LAFD has lowered the strength requirements considerable in order to allow for smaller people. And with the current fires, there is a plenty of footage of small people not being able to do the heavy physical stuff.
And certainly women (and small men) can do many other useful things, but they people that operate GIS terminals would not be "firefighters" in the categorical sense even if they are valuable parts of the fire fighting team.
Group level differences are of little to no value when evaluating a specific candidate.
It is widely understood and accepted that males and females differ in their physiology in ways that have dramatic impacts on their capabilities. However, the two groups form overlapping bell curves, and if you're seeking someone for a task you'd be a lot better off focusing on the attributes of the individual, which may be at either end of their group bell curve or anywhere in between.
Put differently, my wife, when she was a serious triathlete, would never have been able to beat the best males at any distance. But she could beat most of the males in a half ironman. So if you were interviewing her and some male to do something like a half ironman, you'd better make sure you ask a lot more than "what sex are they?". You'd better find out if the male is in the top X%, because if not, you should be hiring her instead.
All of that is true despite the group differences being real and significant.
Hiring is never about groups ... unless you're a racist/sexist/*ist ...
I mean, all of this is obvious. Group-level differences will still lead to the composition of individuals in a given profession differing from the composition of the general population, even if no hiring managers discriminate.
That's not necessarily true, for many kinds of complex sociological, economic and demographic reasons. The nature of the working population is different than the general population. The skills required from the working population vary across time and space, and may very well consist of a set in which different groups vary only slightly. Etc. etc.
Frankly this just reads like a cover story for "I don't want to have to care about this".
Well yeah, it’s an extremely complex system. If we’re just going to leave it at that, then you have no basis for insisting that working populations are proportional to the general population. But you seem to want to have it both ways.
Send applications that are identical save for identifying characteristics (e.g. names, ethnic extracurriculars) and observe of there are disparities in call back rates. Or anonymize applications and observe if the rates change.
Equality of outcome is absolutely not a measure that ensures nondiscrimination. An extreme example, but imagine if we instituted a policy mandating equal outcomes in murder convictions with respect to gender. Would that make the justice system fairer?
It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.