Comment by oremolten
2 months ago
Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?
2 months ago
Could you please elaborate how DEI is not discrimination? Is hiring based on someone's RACE ever not discrimination?
DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce. There's nothing that implies exclusion unless you are intentionally bad faithing the meaning.
Imagine the FAA was only attending job fairs in white parts of the country. Then they decide to attend job fairs in more diverse parts of the country. No one would suddenly decide they were prejudiced against white people!
There's a difference between forcing a white person to give up a seat, and letting a black person sit anywhere on the bus. But both of these are being labelled "DEI" in this thread.
Again, nobody is arguing that the FAA didn't shoot themselves in the foot by introducing a dumb assessment that threw out good candidates. But I think there should be nothing scandalous or wrong with the FAA trying to be available to more candidates.
The DEI label has indeed been placed on overtly discriminatory practices. At 3 out of the 4 companies I've worked at carried out explicit discirmination under the banner of DEI. One such DEI policy was reserving a segment engineering headcount for "diverse" candidates. Quite literally forcing white and Asian men to give up their seat.
You're not in the position to unilaterally declare what DEI is and is not. I don't deny that there are plenty of non-discriminatory DEI programs that genuinely do aim to reduce discrimination. I don't think it's a good move to try and deny that DEI encompasses exclusionary and discriminatory practices, when so many people have witnessed exclusionary and discriminatory DEI programs firsthand.
That isn’t what happened though. What happened was they intentionally turned down highly qualified white applicants. It wasn’t like they found new “diverse” applicants — they actively didn’t hire people that were qualified and happened to be white. They weren’t being “available” to more applicants, they became outwardly hostile to white applicants. They didn’t grow the pie, they moved the pie.
Huge difference.
It wasn't just white, it was minority groups excluded too to make room for other minority groups. I believe a Native American that scored 100% on the entrance exam, with significant experience is one of the major plaintiffs.
The problem here is that the notion that "DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce" is always hidden behind by people who want to use it for more forceful discrimination.
It would serve those who truly just want to make sure our society all starts from the same starting line to come up with a new term, one that encompasses meritocracy as the goal along with generous helping hands along the way (training programs, tutoring programs, outside-the-class mentorship opportunities). And to focus on helping lower _class and income_ folks get a leg up, not on including or excluding people by characteristics that are a circumstance of birth (skin color).
> The problem here is that the notion that "DEI is just a loose label for having less discrimination in the workforce" is always hidden behind by people who want to use it for more forceful discrimination.
Nah. The problem is dishonest hucksters who want to broadly label everything, regardless of applicability, as bad in an effort to provide their supporters with an easy “anti-X” bumper sticker.
DEI advocates came up with DEI to do precisely what you suggest - the right wing rebranded it as “everyone hates white men” and “be afraid of black pilots”. Almost like they just did the same thing with “woke” and “CRT” before it.
It’s extremely tiring to have people like you waltz into conversations to complain about terms you’re busily redefining, being used in their original context, because you don’t like what your own redefinitions imply.
> _class and income_
Yes, part of my company’s DEI effort was to ensure that a JD didn’t, for instance, specify a college degree if it wasn’t really needed. Thank you, again, for restating things that are already occurring because you’re not a part of those conversations or are unaware of those conversations.
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if this question is in good faith, you can read about this ideology by looking up Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X Kendi, who are experts on the pro-DEI academic theory that answers your question.
It seems that the American voter disagrees with Kendi et al
> The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently.
- Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
That just leads to an endless cycle where each group tries to avenge discrimination by the other group.
This is not a serious answer. IMO the fairest but not necessarily most accurate characterization for Ibram X. Kendi would be charlatan (others could say he's deliberately inducing racial hatred and stoking division). Additionally, according to recent news Boston University fired him and closed down his "antiracist research" center.
As soon as they "fired" him he was hired by Howard to direct a new institute there.
He's an academic with multiple publications in the field. How am I, a lay person, supposed to tell if he's a charlatan? He certainly takes himself seriously and has a successful academic career.
Any example could be a false Scotsman. If my example is bad, please provide some that are better. I tried to educate myself on this five years ago and I looked up the people who were recommended to me by DEI practitioners. At the time, Kendi and DiAngelo were held up as icons of the movement.
In American public school twenty years ago we also read Why Do All The Black Kids Sit Together In The Cafeteria. That would also be a good place to start learning about this ideology. Or is that book written by a charlatan, too?
This kind of goalpost moving is as predictable as it is disappointing. You cannot argue with an ideology if it can't be defined, so the practitioners of this one -- descended from Deconstructionism so no wonder they are happy to play word games -- won't allow opponents to define the ideology in the first place!
Well good job, folks, because the reaction to this movement is MAGA.