I spent 25 years in the industry and a dozen as a manager and I can tell you that straight up racism against black and latino people has been coddled and tolerated for a long time.
The solution isn't to say: we won't hire white people, but it is to say, we have to create teams that are heterogeneous (and doing what that takes).
Your personal anecdotes are not what makes up racism, writ large. And the fact that this has to be explained is, you know, the thing.
Probably the the most diverse place I worked at had no such quotas.
My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
There are mountains of research and witnesses. What does your statement mean?
Also, maybe you weren't aware of how they made their hiring choice? People don't usually openly say they are doing it for racist reasons.
> My point is there shouldn't be hiring quotas by race.
I don't think DEI is implemented by quotas usually, nor is racism.
For example, I had a recruiter I relied on heavily. I realized that they only sent me white guys to interview (with one exception).
I have no idea why, but I know the recruiter found people through their own networks, and I bet those networks - usually formed from people we've gone to school with, worked with, socialized with, family, etc. - was white people, and that's who is added to the network. It's self-perpetuating - white people know white people. IIRC, AirBnB's founder knew someone at YC via their MIT fraternity - what do you think they probably looked like (I'm not criticizing AirBnB founders at all - they did amazing; for all I know they are big proponents of DEI)? (There are so many white people - ~60% of the population or ~200 million in the US - that you can spend your entire life without knowing anyone else.) And look around the office of your IT organization; if someone was black, what is the chance that they'd know someone who would help them get a job there?
One method of DEI in hiring is to require that a person from a minority is interviewed for every position (in IT, that includes women). By me requiring that, my recruiter was required to develop networks that included many minorities, and I hope those people - now in the network - got opportunities for other jobs too.
But if you have never seen racism against Latinos or blacks during hiring it is your eyesight that needs checking, my friend.
Things like removing names from CVs are fairly effective at fighting bias.
However, it is best for society to do this. Because it is best for society if all groups are starting from the same point; and that means we need to give a leg up to the groups that are currently being pushed down by the system.
The available talent pool is usually defined by the personal/professional networks of the people doing the hiring, and since the hirers are almost all white, so is the talent pool.
The point is to find more talent - much more - that is not in the current 'pool', to expand the networks.
> you need to negatively impact an individual from the majority to hire the individual from a minority.
The racist competition for survival is the hallmark of the propaganda of racists. It's just a fair competition - do you want minorities excluded from competing for the job? Do you want a handout?
When baseball in the US ended the color line, and allowed black and latino and other athletes to compete for the same jobs as white athletes, were they 'negatively impacting' some white athletes? I guess that's literally true, but do you really think they should have continued to receive 'affirmative action for white people', which is what hiring was and in many ways still is?
That won't solve the problem.
If most Minority-X are born poorer than Majority, then they will have access to a lesser set of opportunities. Less ability to do well in school. Less ability to go to college. Less ability to do well in college. Fewer contacts made through parents. The list goes on an on. And, because of that, the number of individuals in Minority-X that enter the workforce with the same experience and schooling as Majority is much lower. So the pool of people to choose from is skewed towards Majority.
The only realistic solution to this (that's been put forth/tried) is to artificially boost the ability of members of Minority-X to have access to opportunities. Which means there's more members of Minority-X going to school, and doing well, and to college, and so on, and so on. And once the pools start to even out, the artificial boosts are no longer necessary.
Just "expanding your network to people you don't normally interact with" isn't enough, because even the complete pool of _everyone_ that's qualified for a give thing is still biased toward the majority.
We need to expend the networks from the beginning of that pipeline to the end, not just when Corp Z is hiring senior engineers. Colleges need to expand their networks. There's research showing that plenty of disadvantaged kids who could go to elite schools don't apply simply because they don't know what the value is or which schools to apply to. They go to the local college in town.
And you also have a good point: Kids don't go to bad local schools because of a social network, but because the schools are underresourced. We need to boost the resources of those schools.
And that is tough to do unless the people in those schools have political power (for two reasons: For leverage, and because only the locals understand what they need). So political representation needs to be boosted.
And the ideal that all these things will happen doesn't often work out, and we can't ask these kids to wait for this ideal world - it will soon be too late. So we need to provide some artificial help so they can have resources and power and improve those schools, get access to good colleges, etc. ...
- The parents aren't there to help with schoolwork
- Nutrition is poorer (which leads to poorer learning)
- The parent's aren't as available for guidance
- etc
Now, to be very clear, none of this is "you're part of a minority, so it effects you". Rather, it's an impact of being poor; and minorities are more likely to be poor, so as more likely to be impacted. So the end result is the same, but it's not an automatic impact of being a minority, nor is it something that limited to minorities (just more likely for them).
Education works, I guess?
Maybe kids and others who disagree with you aren't indoctrinated, but form their own opinions, and the great majority have seen the research (in college) and the very obvious reality, and concluded there is discrimination. I don't know how you can say otherwise in the face of reality.
'Decades' ago there was even more open racism. It didn't take much education to say that white-only hotels and restaurants, and lynchings indicated there was racism.
Many people today, since 2016, openly embrace racism. What do you say to them?
I'm not quite sure what you mean here. Do you mean, it's not changing faster because it takes a generation? The US has been addressing racism for many generations; the civil rights era - which was not the start of the issue - peaked in the 1960s. The US had the Abolitionist movement in the 19th century and maybe before. The US Civil War was in the 19th century.
It is not "as racist" because we didn't just magically arrive into this moment.
Maybe you didn't know what you were seeing? People don't often openly say, 'I'm not hiring them because they are black'. They don't necessarily think it; they think, 'I'm not as comfortable with this person' and 'I don't know how they'll fit into our team', without even realizing why.
DEI trains people to be aware of those feeling and thoughts and double-check them. Most people don't want to make decisions in that way and appreciate the training.
Exactly this. It's all about awareness.
IMO companies that enforce quotas are not really trying to fix the problem but just forcing the numbers to look good. Because quotas are not solving the mindset that causes this. It's a quick fix. Trainings and workshops are hard work but they actually improve people's self-awareness over time.
When someone says that someone will or won't "fit with the team" what do they mean ?