> if the available pool consists of mainly the majority
The available talent pool is usually defined by the personal/professional networks of the people doing the hiring, and since the hirers are almost all white, so is the talent pool.
The point is to find more talent - much more - that is not in the current 'pool', to expand the networks.
> you need to negatively impact an individual from the majority to hire the individual from a minority.
The racist competition for survival is the hallmark of the propaganda of racists. It's just a fair competition - do you want minorities excluded from competing for the job? Do you want a handout?
When baseball in the US ended the color line, and allowed black and latino and other athletes to compete for the same jobs as white athletes, were they 'negatively impacting' some white athletes? I guess that's literally true, but do you really think they should have continued to receive 'affirmative action for white people', which is what hiring was and in many ways still is?
> The point is to find more talent - much more - that is not in the current 'pool', to expand the networks.
That won't solve the problem.
If most Minority-X are born poorer than Majority, then they will have access to a lesser set of opportunities. Less ability to do well in school. Less ability to go to college. Less ability to do well in college. Fewer contacts made through parents. The list goes on an on. And, because of that, the number of individuals in Minority-X that enter the workforce with the same experience and schooling as Majority is much lower. So the pool of people to choose from is skewed towards Majority.
The only realistic solution to this (that's been put forth/tried) is to artificially boost the ability of members of Minority-X to have access to opportunities. Which means there's more members of Minority-X going to school, and doing well, and to college, and so on, and so on. And once the pools start to even out, the artificial boosts are no longer necessary.
Just "expanding your network to people you don't normally interact with" isn't enough, because even the complete pool of _everyone_ that's qualified for a give thing is still biased toward the majority.
I agree to a great extent, though I think it's a matter of misunderstanding between us:
We need to expend the networks from the beginning of that pipeline to the end, not just when Corp Z is hiring senior engineers. Colleges need to expand their networks. There's research showing that plenty of disadvantaged kids who could go to elite schools don't apply simply because they don't know what the value is or which schools to apply to. They go to the local college in town.
And you also have a good point: Kids don't go to bad local schools because of a social network, but because the schools are underresourced. We need to boost the resources of those schools.
And that is tough to do unless the people in those schools have political power (for two reasons: For leverage, and because only the locals understand what they need). So political representation needs to be boosted.
And the ideal that all these things will happen doesn't often work out, and we can't ask these kids to wait for this ideal world - it will soon be too late. So we need to provide some artificial help so they can have resources and power and improve those schools, get access to good colleges, etc. ...
I agree with a lot of what you're saying. I'd like to point out, though, that some amount of poor schooling is beyond the schools themselves. For example, being raised in a poor family where both parents (or the only parent) are working long hours tends to mean
- The parents aren't there to help with schoolwork
- Nutrition is poorer (which leads to poorer learning)
- The parent's aren't as available for guidance
- etc
Now, to be very clear, none of this is "you're part of a minority, so it effects you". Rather, it's an impact of being poor; and minorities are more likely to be poor, so as more likely to be impacted. So the end result is the same, but it's not an automatic impact of being a minority, nor is it something that limited to minorities (just more likely for them).
The available talent pool is usually defined by the personal/professional networks of the people doing the hiring, and since the hirers are almost all white, so is the talent pool.
The point is to find more talent - much more - that is not in the current 'pool', to expand the networks.
> you need to negatively impact an individual from the majority to hire the individual from a minority.
The racist competition for survival is the hallmark of the propaganda of racists. It's just a fair competition - do you want minorities excluded from competing for the job? Do you want a handout?
When baseball in the US ended the color line, and allowed black and latino and other athletes to compete for the same jobs as white athletes, were they 'negatively impacting' some white athletes? I guess that's literally true, but do you really think they should have continued to receive 'affirmative action for white people', which is what hiring was and in many ways still is?