Comment by tempfile

Seems like there is obviously a spectrum of positions here and various people have found themselves calling certain positions "DEI" or "anti-DEI" or "affirmative action" or "racist" depending on which positions they hold and where a particular institution lies on it. For example:

1. A company that hires mainly based on on-paper qualifications (which, due to existing disparities in experience and education, means in practice that they hire fewer historically disadvantaged minorities)

2. A company that, believing that talent or merit is more equitably distributed among groups than on-paper qualifications may suggest, goes out of their way to interview a greater proportion of historically disadvantaged minority groups than necessarily would naturally apply to their positions (to discover those as-of-yet-unrecognized talents), and tries to hire based on actual merit and ability rather than on-paper qualifications.

3. A company that has the goal of creating a more equitable and diverse workforce with groups that more closely matches their proportions of the population. They spend a lot of time and effort actively recruiting and seeking out employees from underrepresented minority groups, meaning that it is effectively easier for minority groups to get interviews at this company for this position, but still tries to hire based on actual ability and talent once they get to the interview stage

4. A company which, accounting for the disparities in distribution of measurable abilities of groups, tries to hire based on within-group ability rather than between-group ability; for example trying to hire the top 10th percentile of black, or top 10th percentile asian, or top 10th percentile male, rather than top 10th percentile of all applicants in aggregate (which would likely be overrepresented by over-performing groups). This in practice means using a different standard for different groups, but using the within group distribution of talent; they may say they are "considering race/sex/disability as one of many factors they take into account"

5. A company that in practice has an explicit hiring quota based on the race/sex/etc. of applicants, in order to create a more equitable or diverse workforce that matches the relative sizes of those groups in the local population.

6. A company that, in order to reverse historical and current disparities in achievement within society, actively discriminates in the opposite direction as historical trend, with the goal of evening the playing field more quickly.

7. A company that, in order to address historical grievances and grant some amount of justice to victims of discrimination and oppression, actively and purposefully discriminates against privileged majority and overachieving groups, favoring underprivileged and underachieving groups, up to and including reparations for past injustices to remedy current disparities.

I'm pretty sure 1-3 are legal and 4-7 are illegal, but I'm not a lawyer so that's just my guess. Some hardliners might attack 2 as going too far, but somewhere between 3 and 4 is probably the more common point at which anti-DEI people draw their line.

The history is more than a little complicated. I model it as a set of separate overton windows in different institutions that have shifted, widened, and contracted over the last 60 or so years. So in this picture, courts arguably expanded it to 4-6 in the 80s, but have retreated back to around 2-3 since then. Legislature has mostly stayed around 2-3 with a handful of radicals pushing higher or lower with low-to-moderate success. Academia has been around 5-7 since the 70s. Executive has mostly hovered around 3-5 until Trump. Media/popular culture, big shift up to 6-7 in 2014-2021, retreating back to 3-4 now. Also, motte-and-baileys are common here; pro-DEI activists sometimes frame it as something like 2, but often advocate up to 6 or 7 (e.g. "antiracism" in the 2020s peak). anti-DEI activists often say they simply oppose quotas and illegal discrimination (4-7), but in practice sometimes attack even 2-3 as being too much.