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Comment by jrsj | Hacker News Reader

It didn’t take long after Silicon Valley was no longer on the air for the entire industry to become more absurd than its parody.

I really don’t think any of this is sustainable either. Latinos in particular seem very opposed to this stuff & given that they are part of the fastest growing demographic in the country I don’t see how political support for policies like this can be maintained.

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These politics only appeal to ~10% of the population anyway, and they aren't favored by a majority of any ethnicity. This stuff isn't mainstream because voters like it (which is why it never makes its way into any real laws), it's mainstream because the cultural and media elites like it and they don't have to trifle with a democratic process to impose it.

Corporate DEI stuff is also useful to "prove" that an employer isn't racist--current anti-discrimination law puts the burden of proof on employers to show that they didn't discriminate, and since it's not possible to prove a negative, they must instead compete to show that they're among the more 'woke' companies ("look at our DEI propaganda, how could we possibly be guilty of discrimination?").

Corporate DEI has laws backing it, but I don't think that's the full picture. Corporations have a genuine economic interest in diverse hiring even if those laws didn't exist: 1) Diverse hiring expands the labor pool, which suppresses wages. 2) Diverse labor organizes less effectively, particularly if the workers can be kept on edge around each other.

I don't doubt that it's not the full picture, but I'm skeptical about your theory. My $0.02:

Regarding (1), it only expands the labor pool if the pipeline for "diverse" labor hasn't already been exhausted. Instead we seem to see employers competing for "diverse" labor, including in some cases foregoing technical qualifications for "diverse" qualifications. This is only in the company's best interest to the extent that it's economically advantageous to appear to be striving for diversity.

Regarding (2), I really don't think most companies are to the point where they're deliberately stoking racial division as an anti-union tactic, at least not in the FAANG space. Seems like it would be a lot easier to push the political divide button which is pre-primed on account of the media.

>I really don't think most companies are to the point where they're deliberately stoking racial division as an anti-union tactic

Amazon tracks lack of racial diversity as a union formation risk metric https://www.informationliberation.com/?id=61403

For 2) corporations themselves may not be doing it with that in mind but when management consultants like McKinsey etc began pushing for this stuff I absolutely believe it was a consideration.

If anyone has seen Severance on Apple TV, the animosity fostered between the MDI and O&D departments is an excellent example of the strategy behind this last point.

“Management isn’t taking advantage of you; it’s the person sitting next to you with a different gender or skin color that’s the threat”

There are laws against certain types of discrimination. Corporate DEI is something else altogether (and if the anecdata elsewhere in this thread are to believed, run in direct opposition to some of those anti-discrimination laws).

I guess what I mean is that I believe this will become a political issue again & the backlash will be strong enough that cultural & media elites will no longer be able to maintain it.

My understanding is that Corporate DEI is mostly bottom up, not top down.

It usually starts as an HR initiative & then ERGs are created as a means of fulfilling goals set by the HR departments. I wouldn’t really characterize it as bottom up, although I’m sure there are plenty of companies where C suite & other divisions didn’t want this to happen & it’s being used as political leverage against them.

I recently made a move from Seattle to Dallas.

While in Seattle I was consumed by the thought that all of American academia, business, and media was consumed by idpol and other associated confusions. In Seattle, every interaction is permeated by conversations about identity, and friend groups are highly segregated by class, if not race.

Moving to Dallas completely changed my perspective. Dallas is an actual multicultural utopia. Everywhere I went, people of all kinds were doing stuff together, and not in the soft late 90s ghetto mural of rainbows and people holding hands, I mean just hanging out as if you would with friends from your neighborhood. Funny that in practice, Texas is significantly less class and race divided than Seattle.

I'm happy that latinos reject this stuff. I'm even more happy to know that it hasn't spread throughout the entire US.

From what I've gathered the few times I've been to Seattle, it isn't so much racially segregated as predominantly white. A Black friend of mine moved there to work for Amazon and hated Seattle. Eventually he got the ability to relocate to LA and is much happier now.

I was in Austin last weekend and it appeared very diverse; much less segregated than the Bay Area.

I've heard things similar about Seattle specifically that line up with what both you and the parent commenter are saying.

Maybe Seattle just sucks?

Had a similar experience visiting Texas and I’m looking forward to moving there myself soon.

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