DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it, it is more about considering diversity and recognizing personal and institutional bias, and working to ensure that bias does not negatively affect people, whether that be in hiring, consideration for roles or promotions, and so on.
All the things we've seen both in government and in companies suddenly dumping DEI programs is craven, and if you actually look you can see it's already doing damage. There seem to be a lot of assumptions that women or people of color in high positions are "DEI hires" when they likely had to work harder than white men to get where they are. I mean firing a 4-star admiral because she's a woman and then claiming she was a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are. Automatically assuming a black or trans pilot is a DEI hire is insane, but that's where we are.
I'm very pleased to see this all coming to an end. I've witnessed what can only be explained as outright racism. As a white male, I've been called a blue-eyed devil in team meetings and I've been accused of sexual harassment. The most disappointing thing of all is thinking back on people's careers whom I know were affected by all this. Some of my best directs were denied transfers and promotion opportunities simply because they weren't the right gender or race. I even know one person who literally faked being non-binary so they would stand a better chance of getting hired and it worked.
It wasn't all bad. Some of the training I had to take I still use today and learning how to practice allyship absolutely made me a better leader, but this got way too out of control and I'm not at all surprised people got tired of it and started pushing back.
I have on good authority the same was true at Microsoft. They also required candidates who identify as non-diverse have their applications sorted behind some minimum number of diverse applicants.
Finally, from the article in this post:
> Google’s commitments for 2025 had included increasing the number of people from underrepresented groups in leadership by 30% and more than doubling the number of Black workers at non-senior levels.
It is not possible to set race or gender based targets without discriminating against the groups that aren't in those targets.
These practices are all forms of discriminating on the basis of race and or sex, i.e. they are racist and sexist. This is how DEI has manifested. It is a fringe ideology and it actively harms the goal of a truly egalitarian society. You cannot solve racism with more racism.
The issue I faced is that monoculture in teams becomes increasingly self reinforcing over time to the point that it can be difficult to reverse, and then becomes problematic for hiring and retaining the best talent.
Two concrete examples here: An engineering team that was overwhelmingly men, and where we had difficulty retaining extremely talented women engineers because despite everyone’s best efforts they didn’t feel comfortable on the team. And an identical problem on our finance team, except in this case we lost a very talented man who didn’t feel comfortable in a team exclusively made up of women. In many cases, as you continue to scale the company and team, it can become more difficult over time to attract the top talent who often even self select out of the hiring process.
Putting yourself in my shoes, how would you solve for this?
If this is the starting point, then wouldn't small, diverse teams be totally dysfunctional?
I have no sympathy for someone who can't work on a team of people of the opposite sex. In fact, in multiple jobs I've been the only man on an all female team. Not once did it occur to me that that could be a problem.
Edit: I don't think trying to get all types of people like you're collecting Pokemon is the fix since then you get more cliques/unofficial teams which may or may not get along with each other. The best you can do is probably offer applicants to remain for a bit after the interview just chilling in the office, talking to people so they can see if they like the people but in the end it just doesn't work out sometimes.
Yes, it has. Look at the college admissions. The test score requirements for black students were way way lower than those for the Asian students in many universities and colleges. That's favoring people by their skin color.
Which is illegal since at least 1964.
[1] https://www.nber.org/papers/w29964
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Students_for_Fair_Admissions_v...
Some companies are under legal pressure to avoid lawsuits because some programs are violating civil rights. I wouldn't call those instances craven.
As for your definition of DEI, I find it fairly out of touch with the reality of the situation. Regardless of how we want to define DEI in the hypothetical perfect world, the reality is a large portion of current DEI programs look absolutely nothing like what you described.
> DEI is not "reverse racism" as so many want to put it
I have been in the room where HR/hiring managers have explicitly stated that they want to hire [specific race/gender] for an open role. This has been at major companies. In states where this is explicitly illegal.
In the very high level abstract, the goal of DEI programs may not be to engage in explicitly illegal race/sex discrimination, but in practice, this is how it often turns out.
I will let others give their own anecdotes, as cases like this are widespread.
There’s a bias against tattoos. What price should the company pay to overcome multigenerational tattoo-phobia? Tattoo activists will tell you any amount of money and inefficiency is morally required.
The shift from “non-discrimination between races” to “offsetting differences attributable to society’s bias” necessarily calls for special treatment of those perceived as disadvantaged, and so becomes illegal where the law lays down a nondiscrimination rule. Kendi was honest about that part.
You're right, reverse racism does not exist, it's just racism.
> to work harder than white men to get where they are.
Asian Americans prove this is not true. I recall that statically the average wage for asians in America is higher than white people.
On the other hand, the tricky bit comes in when it's only in retrospect everyone agrees those were terrible perversions of DEI. When they're actually in place, anyone who criticizes them is considered a racist neo-Nazi.
I learned about it, went "oh that sucks", but never felt like they were being racist. They have a great evidentiary basis. Its not like some red hat guy screeching about losing his job without being able to show cause.
Equity factors in historical and sociopolitical factors that affect opportunities and experiences. This could mean that if we have a candidate who seems to be with lesser qualification then they potentially can be hired over a more qualified candidate.
This is with reasoning that due to past decades (and centuries) of historical situations a candidate was led through a path which landed them with a 'lesser' qualification. So, now if we continue to correct this historical situation then sometime in future the need for Equity would disappear, since that future generation is result of a equitable society - then no more excuses, if you have lesser qualification then it is your doing and not society's.
You forgot transphobist and whatever the -ist form of Nazi is. National Socialist, possibly. No point going with half-measures on the insults.
