Unfortunately the name (and perhaps ideas?) are now tainted and I hope this doesn't impact the bottom up approaches (i.e support kids and young adults with extra classes, trainings, and in general just being chill and accepting about people) which probably should have been the focus from the start.
If that support is available to those who need it irrespective of race, sex, et cetera, sure.
Targeting underserved populations is one thing. Restricting access based on protected characteristics is illegal under any commonsense interpretation of the law.
So someone who would have gotten a slot based on - say - pure technical performance - won’t if these criteria are taken into account.
It’s fundamental and ‘working as intended’.
Regardless of any additional outreach being performed.
It’s basic analysis.
If there is an underlying difference in quality, yes. If it’s people from one group not getting applications in, no. There are a lot of smart people gate kept from opportunities due to trivial things like application fees.
Because if that is the issue, that sounds pretty cheap and easy to fix.
I agree this can be accomplished without explicitly targeting race of other protected characteristics.
What about when you turn that on its head?
"Promoting access based on ..."
If you assume a finite set of places to access then the approaches are equivalent, but for the the emphasis
I think it matters (I am unsure DEI is the solution) that people can access professional services supplied by professionals from a similar cultural background to themselves
In Aotearoa we have mechanisms to encourage Māori applicants to law and medical school for exactly this reason, and it seems to have been both hugely successful and extremely triggering.
I see the argument for setting aside seats for people who fluently speak the language. I do not based on race. ”Black patients hav[ing] better interactions, on average, with physicians of their own race” is a problem, but segregating medical care on the basis of race isn’t the solution [1].
The researchers found that when successful treatment would require the patient to follow the doctors instructions after leaving, such as getting a prescription filled, taken the full course of medication, doing or refraining from certain exercises, etc., the patient was more likely to actually do those things the more the doctor was like them in things like race, gender, and ethnicity.
It is based on culture
It is not enough to have genes.
And since most Māori people speak English it would simply be stupid to base it on language as that language would be English not Te Reo Māori
It is what it's called, here, in NZ English
Why exactly is it "unhelpful"? You say there's no risk of simply saying Maori - what is the risk in calling it what it's called?
"unhelpful" is a mild expression of discomfort
If one can define culture without relying on biological heredity, sure again. It would be better, however, to address the underlying issue: lack of cross-cultural knowledge that causes the reduced outcomes. (And why Māori students aren't getting into those programmes in a race-neutral process.)
Sure. But normalising discrimination based on race entrenches it.
When folks are hungry and/or insecure, it feels like taking from their and their children’s mouths and giving to their competition.
And there are essentially fractal levels of division possible.
And so the wheel turns.
If you genuinely want to target underserved populations, you must be prepared to exclude those who are not in the target audience.
We have agreed as a society on a set of protected classes. Not being allowed to discriminate based on race or sex doesn’t mean not being able to discriminate at all.
That is a puzzling statement. Why is it true?
But what DEI actually means in practice is someone in HR keeping statistics on how many non-white-male programmers you have, and scolding you because you haven't hired enough non-white-males. That kind of DEI leads to non-optimal use of everyone's talent, because you hire non-optimal people for the job openings you have.
Diversity is not really a value. If it were, it would have been recognized as such millennia ago, because already the Egyptians and the Babylonians knew what mixed societies looked like. It is not as if American diversity is a new phenomenon, never seen before. Rome or Alexandria in 1 AD was very diverse, and so was India when Buddha was still a young and naive prince.
Real human values, virtues and vices don't change that much across centuries. You can still discern courage, truthfulness, sloth or compassion in stories written three thousand years ago and half a world away. Diversity as a pseudovalue is a modern fad of American origin, partly conjured into being by ancient American racial problems.
Even many American allies (Japan, Taiwan, Poland, Finland, Denmark, Turkey, Argentina, Israel etc.) don't bother to even pretend to worship at that DEI-emblazoned altar, so dear to the good professors of Berkeley. Countries with more distant political systems like the Arab sheikhdoms or China probably don't even understand what the word is supposed to mean.
Prejudice of any form is unhelpful. Racism is particularly nasty
If you want to address racism, throw away the entire neo-racist stuff that now passes for enlightened and start again. "Whiteness" et al. belong to the same heap of historical refuse as "Judeobolshevism" or "degenerate art".
I can't think of a better way to deepen and perpetuate absurd divisions among people than the identity obsession and pseudo-quotas that the modern American progressive movement is pushing.
I can: going back to ignoring the division that was already being perpetuated.
There is, though, some space to swing the pendulum too far in the other direction, where white male is the universally undesirable employee/student, and East Asian male meets the same fate because he is "white-adjacent".
Do you have any examples for this ?
eg: Daisy Bates oozed good intentions
https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bates-daisy-may-83
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daisy_Bates_(author)
and strongly put the case that:
"As to the half-castes, however early they may be taken and trained, with very few exceptions, the only good half-caste is a dead one."
But yeah, good intentions.