I sat in an all hands where the vice president of HR proudly crowed to the company that they had hired 75% non-whites that quarter.
A better way to look at it: We can and should try to mitigate the indirect, generational disadvantages of past racial discrimination. Some of those disadvantages are domino effects, manifested over many years. They're the evil twin of generational wealth.
Those generational disadvantages can be a drag on the descendants of the victims of the past discrimination. That gives a certain amount of comparative advantage to those of us whose ancestors didn't suffer racial discrimination — and who benefit from present-day white advantage even when our ancestors weren't among the racial oppressors.
Sure, my various immigrant grandparents, great-grandparents, and great-great-grandparents had to deal with a certain amount of ethnic discrimination. But it was nothing like that suffered by nonwhites.
The YouTube "head start in the race of life" video is spot on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vvHWAjh3Ks
Some will say, it's not my job to mitigate today's effects of past discrimination. That seems ... uncitizenly, if you will.
The correct analogy is, “Suppose you were abused by your parent; should you be allowed to establish a benefit specifically and only for the abused children of other parents?”
You and 0xDEAFBEAD answer that question no, because that benefit discriminates in your mind against all non-abused children. And against all adults, probably. I don’t know how deep the grievance mobilization goes.
The rationale for racial preferences in 2025 is not that they are a benefit to individuals who were personally harmed by racial discrimination. The institutions engaging in these practices insist that they are otherwise engaged in race blind practices. If such practices existed, DEI as we know it would be unnecessary. We could simply just enforce the existing laws in a race-blind way.
No, this is a consequence of your ideology, which assumes that racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Act and etc. (Hence “we could simply just enforce. . .”) Mine does not.
Note that the metaphor as stated by 0xDEAFBEAD, which you already said was good, did not include this additional generational gap.
It’s also not even an ideological matter. It’s a testable fact. There’s very little evidence that universities and corporations are discriminating against non-whites/asians.
1. Fewer minorities *want* to go to college -- what do you think causes that bias?
2. Minorities want to go to college, but due to factors of their environment are less able to make it to college -- what do you think leads to that inability?
3. Minorities want to go to college, and their environment is just as supportive of that goal as for white, but minorities are less capable (on average) of achieving that goal -- what are we to make of this?
4. Some other explanation I haven't thought of????
>Your terminology escalation to "abuse" seems absurd to me
It was an analogy.
>white people in general seem to have done fine
Black people in the US are also doing far better than Black people in Africa or frankly pretty much any other country with a large Black population.
That analogy is invalid because the original injustice here was discrimination, and people are proposing more discrimination in order to correct the original discrimination. Maybe that would be reasonable if you could be sure that the new discrimination narrowly targets people who unjustly benefited from the old discrimination. However, in practice this is unlikely to be the case: You'll have a situation where senior engineers benefited from discrimination, and we discriminate against a different set of junior engineers in order to "balance the scales". Two wrongs don't make a right.
Furthermore, as a method for achieving justice this is highly dysfunctional. There's no way to get consensus on what the "sentence" should be. There's no way to measure the degree to which the "sentence" has been meted out. It's just a big case of "squeaky wheel gets the grease". The more DEI professionals you hire, the more they will advocate for the need to hire DEI professionals, until the thing collapses into self-parody and Trump gets re-elected.
It's already possible to sue corporations for discrimination and violation of civil rights law. Why is this remedy insufficient? Maybe because there isn't actually a good legal case to be made that the alleged discrimination actually occurred, and people are just grasping at straws?
In any case: We can play these sort of zero-sum and negative-sum games until the cows come home. Functional societies don't cry over spilled milk, and instead focus on positive-sum games. To facilitate positive-sum games, we need a stable and predictable legal framework, not quixotic justice quests which mysteriously get ever more urgent the more the injustice recedes into the past.
A set of rules for fairness require that current decisions only account for individual merit; not special status.
But in any case, it seems like your answer is zero, right?
But how do you think people arrive at the conclusion that whites/males have been favored in the past? Do they:
1) inspect their hiring practices and find evidence of discrimination
2) look at the proportion of minorities in the company vs proportion of minorities in the general population and conclude that any disparity is proof of discrimination
I'm curious why you say that, since we've arguably been managing without "the best for the job" for centuries, anytime the best was a woman or a minority.
It really makes you think that all the "men and women are the same and sometimes women are even better" always starts at the silicon valley jobs and stops right at enlistment which would be actual equality.
Oh for sure, for sure. It's hard to predict exactly how the secondary effects play out. But I was referring to the primary intended effects, which I think is what the person I was replying to was talking about.
You missed the memo, they're not pushing this narrative any longer. The poor attempt to launder DEI via the disabled is twisted and transparent. The ADA predates DEI by decades, and has broad support from both sides of the aisle.
And yeah, the ADA has received broad bipartisan support in passage because it's well understood even by partisans that disabilities affect everyone, so it's important to have protections in place.
What's not so understood by partisans is how those disabilities manifest, so since the passage of the ADA there has also been widespread pushback on what qualifies as a disability, and what accommodations are reasonable. THAT is a whole different conversation which, as someone who is disabled and covered under the ADA, I will say can be like pulling teeth to get protections guaranteed under the law. For example, businesses are often loathe to make physical accommodations like ramps and elevators, and there is often resistance to providing accommodations for mental health conditions or neurodiversity.
But DEI itself is about creating equitable access and participation for everyone. This includes people who are disabled, and at no point in time has DEI not included disabled people. Maybe for the terminally online right, who only focus on gender and race, but that's not what it's all about in the real world. Notably, DEI also has been a driving force for veteran employment (having dedicated veteran hiring pipelines is absolutely DEI). It's very common for people to do what you're doing now -- "All the accommodations I like and/or benefit me are sound law and not DEI; all the accommodations I don't like are DEI and must be outlawed"
No they're not. Fairness is antithetical to DEI.
>But DEI itself is about creating equitable access and participation for everyone.
DEI is specifically designed to exclude those who rank low on the oppression Olympics rankings, access and participation are antithetical to DEI.
>Notably, DEI also has been a driving force for veteran employment (having dedicated veteran hiring pipelines is absolutely DEI).
These existed before DEI.
>It's very common for people to do what you're doing now -- "All the accommodations I like and/or benefit me are sound law and not DEI; all the accommodations I don't like are DEI and must be outlawed"
"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
Why do you think that? Because it makes you feel good or because there is an actual measurable benefit? And no you don't need to have a specific skin color or sexual orientation to be considered diverse/different. If you think "all white dudes are/think the same" maybe change white to black and say that in front of a mirror.
First, we are all enriched by having a variety of experiences and perspectives available to draw upon.
Second, I feel stronger bonds with historically marginalized humans than with humans who happen to belong to my own demographic.
> If you think "all white dudes are/think the same"
Ha, we definitely do not all think alike.
The moment HR rejects a candidate for being "insufficiently diverse" that's a zero sum game isn't it?
The difference, I think, is that I'm not blind to the advantages I receive every day for being a white male. In the words of Louis CK, "If you're a white male and don't admit that it is thoroughly awesome, you're an asshole."
For example, if your country gets attacked, primarily the men go and defend their country and people. Is that "thoroughly awesome"? Anyway have a nice day
Really like what? There are many concrete examples of how "white dudes" are statistically are disadvantaged.
Higher rate to being victim of a violent crime, suicide, homelessness, harsher sentences, dying at work, dying younger, dying in a war, white guilt