Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hayst4ck | Hacker News Reader

This post will start off sounding like I am not very liberal, but I am very liberal.

There is one question a diversity authority needs to answer:

"If you want a larger amount of people from a small pool of viable candidates, how do you do that without lowering the bar?"

Stated differently, if 1 in 100 university graduates earning a software engineering degree are black, but you want your company's demographics to match the population demographics which is 15 in 100, how do you get closer to 15 in 100 without accepting unqualified candidates or without having the average black employee under perform the average employee as a whole?

Any diversity bureaucrat that fails to answer that question is absolutely unqualified and is a detriment to the institution they are a part of.

There is one harsh reality that needs to be understood: Affirmative action and diversity initiatives ("C" level diversity focused staff) are functionally reparations.

The American public has robbed entire classes of people of wealth, and therefore their ability to pay for competitive advantages, like private school, which other people can afford. This results in not just systemic disadvantage, but generational disadvantage.

I don't think generational disadvantage can be solved without efforts like affirmative action, but the packaging that diversity bureaucrats are selling is one that requires proportional response, and therefore foments backlash.

Diversity bureaucrats try to use power, rather than justice, to achieve their goals. "We will fire you if you disagree" is using power. "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice. The difference is subtle, but important.

Actually, affirmative action likely suppresses the rates of Black students majoring in CS because it increases the rates at which they drop out of the major. Universities have good data on how likely a student is to graduate in their chosen field, and they know that the bulk of the Black student they admit who flag STEM fields as their preferred majors will not succeed but they admit them anyway to achieve the desired demographics. Absent affirmative action, these students would be attending less prestigious universities, but they would be graduating in STEM at higher rates. This is the research that explores the effect of affirmative action on majors: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6675032/

Some claim that racism inside the university is why Black students drop out of STEM. However, the rates of persistence in STEM for the same level of academic performance is the same for all races: a Black student with 700s on their SAT is as likely to succeed as a white or Asian student with 700s. A student with 600s or 500s is less likely to succeed, and equally so regardless of their race. But if you admit a lot more Black students with the latter scores, you can see how this will affect persistence rates.

I think you're largely dead on. "DEI" programs are affirmative action dressed, along with an authoritarian undertone.

> "Reparations are the right thing to do. Offering opportunity to those we have taken them from" is justice.

Couching reparations as inherently being just, which perhaps you didn't intend, is where I disagree with you. The idea of reparations is pretty contentious[1]. I think that very fact is exactly why these affirmative action programs have to be dressed up, and faux-support has to be forced, as much as it is.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/261722/redress-slavery-american...

The is actually a clique in leftist thought that bemoans the "diversity" framing for reparations. Because with diversity you have to advantage people who were never entitled to any kind of reparations. For example there is no reason for Latinos to recieve reparations (most of them are white after all). So these people would rather that only ADOS and NA people recieve any benefit from these schemes

>For example there is no reason for Latinos to recieve reparations

Wasn't Cortez a big meanie or something? You might point out he had little to do with the USG, but the core DEI crowd doesn't care about that, just European colonizers.

The history of Latin America is complicated and it may be difficult to cleanly separate colonist vs colonized in today's world. But at the same time most Latinos self ID as white and as such are simply white people who were born in another country

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