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Comment by mdorazio | Hacker News Reader

Here's the corollary of that: how does typical DEI actually help equality of opportunity? Put another way, do you think a black student from a wealthy family in San Jose or a poor white student from rural Alabama needs more help? Now show me a real-world DEI program that would help the white student instead of the black one.

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The argument there is that people from under-represented populations have to face discrimination regardless of their economic status. This is why DEI looks at the whole cross section of socio-economic status, and not just the economic part.

To put it simply, a poor white student from rural Alabama only needs a proper accent and a good suit to blend in with the upper-classes. However, a black student only needs to lose access to their parents money and they immediately have a longer harder uphill battle to fight against racism which will presume them to be uneducated, underperforming, and generationally poor unless they work 2x as hard to prove it wrong.

That said...

I do think there's a danger in supporting DEI programs simply because they have good outcomes (which other posters are doing). If a group achieves your end-results but doesn't have your philosophy, then my life experience (e.g. MAGA) has shown that they will become the enemy that you don't see until it's too late.

My statement was in regard to the posters overall philosophy on equity and not any particular DEI program.

I would agree that most would probably fail that test, does they mean we need blanket bans on equity programs or more effective ones?

If the programs are based on race instead of eg. financial status, access to education, etc., then yeah, banning them would help little white Bobby from a trailer park, because he currently can't get that help because of his skin color.

I used to think this way too; until I recently noticed it was a false dichotomy! There is plenty of room to be spent on money for impoverished youngsters of any background and we should be petitioning our politicians to spend MORE OVERALL on youth, education, and nourishment programs. It doesn't have to be a zero-sum, but our politicians don't want us to realize this...

American in particular needs nourishment funding for all socioecon/demographic classes.

But if you do that, you don't have to separate kids by race anymore.

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