> I am no great fan of the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which enforces Title VII in the workplace. I will not defend its activities, now or ever. I also happen to think that Title VII and the idea of disparate racial impact it spawned, have been very corrosive to American legal traditions — for example, it is possible for plaintiffs in civil rights suits to ignore a respondent’s intent and argue discrimination based on disparity alone. That makes it very difficult to run companies on merit, because any unintentional “disparate impact” against a protected class (or even perceived disparate impact) could be cause for harassment by the EEOC, which files thousands of suits annually. But if there were ever a slam dunk case of race-based labor discrimination, admitted to in official communications, this is it. I mean, come on; they’re bragging about it!

I think the way Title VII has contributed to a competitive DEI culture is under-discussed. Specifically, because the EEOC has this unfalsifiable notion of discrimination, it drives companies to compete on "seeming undiscriminatory" (because each company has to show that it is doing better than the median, which has a "no child left behind" effect of raising the median) which mostly amounts to increasingly ridiculous shenanigans while trying to meet the standard set by the letter of the law. For example, the structure of EEOC Title VII inquisitions pressures companies to search extra hard to hire diverse candidates from a fixed size pipeline (the only way to make this work is to relax qualification requirements while pretending qualification requirements aren't relaxed, and maybe to fire any employees who fail to play along), but they can only go so far before they run up against the letter of the law which prohibits them from, say, openly firing people for their race.

EDIT: Of course this submission got flagged. :eye-roll: