> The main objection that I see is against the
policies which are enacted in pursuit of that goal.
That's fair, but then, baby goes out with the bathwater when people come onto public fora to discuss in less precise ways than you have stated here.
> There is a cost of the efforts to bring in those perspectives if they mean that I lose a job that I would otherwise have gained.
This is an individualized cost, which does not bear the externalities which exist on the society as a whole. On a societal scale, there is significant and obvious opportunity cost to excluding people from the workplace in systematic ways. It is, in a word, selfish.
> Moreover, an even bigger concern is that these decisions aren't being made based on perspective, but only on immutable identity
This is where the pathologies ossify, and I agree we should address this issue to make the endeavor even better. In any other setting, though, we would not collectively conclude to dissolve the initiative entirely because of this. This may be why discussions (debates) on the matter go so poorly: critics use language which suggests they want to do away with the matter entirely, while advocates are fighting back only against that proposed solution and not against what you have identified as a deeper (and definitely fixable!) problem. If conversations were to start there, and SOPs set up to encourage outcomes that do not have that quality, we could get a lot more done. I acknowledge that there are some who would exclude white voices based on whiteness alone -- every movement has that element -- so conversations may be non-starters in certain situations. But there's clearly a lot of hurt and trauma on both sides and the way we come together to discuss it looks basically exactly like how DEI advocates suggest anyway, so you're only hurting the cause if you decide to exclude yourself from these conversations when they are available to you.
One last point about the unfairness: there is a distinct tension in the collective mind between considering outcomes from individual vs societal perspectives. We love to hear about rising tides but hate to hear about one person getting unfair benefits. But that's just a matter of statistics, fortunately or otherwise! Do we want more equity, or do we want such a strict ranking of individuals that social mobility is made impossible? Individuals may have bad outcomes because random things happen, individuals may have good outcomes because random things happen, and there are always people moving up and down the ladder. Just because you can point at a single person who got advantaged one time does not mean it's not happening elsewhere, all the time, and it seems really immature to direct vitriol at individuals when we are only really concerned with aggregate quantities.