Who cares about diversity?

I care about diversity, as I care in equality for all, I'm an egalitarian. However, I think perhaps we should make it more of a blind thing, where you don't get to see or know the person's race/gender etc. All applications come with a # and are essentially jane or john Doe's.

Then the only diversity they need worry about is income diversity, where they need to have equal #'s from extreme poverty as they have from extreme wealthy. Income does trend some in more diverse communities anyways, so it'll happen naturally that this will create more diversity, but it takes away some of the stigmas and angst around it because everyone being accepted is more of a number and acceptance is more based on their achievements etc..

Given the stark racial inequality we have today due to compounding wealth from centuries of colonialism and slavery, it seems diversity is the bare minimum we could do to address such a burden, and it's a shame that is even considered controversial. Is there an "unoffensive" solution to address this history or should we all just get along and pretend it didn't happen?

I'm trying to actually figure out what his points are. None of it is making much sense because he just seems so far off in his own thinking that it's not connected to DEI at all. Still trying to untangle it, but here's my lol as I work through what he's saying.

1.1 When did we start pretending to care about diversity?

He says 1978. What? He's fabricating a story to prop up his flawed belief system.

1.2 Diversity is intellectual?

It's good because it promotes a good education. What? It's far more about that: representation, opportunities for historically marginalized groups, challenging the status quo with ideas of how things should be done, etc.

2.1 The argument for affirmative action

How did we get to affirmative action? Are we back in the 1980's view of how we are supposed to level the playing field?

> by diversifying the racial composition of the student body, we will be indirectly producing intellectual diversity.

Yikes. He's totally missing the point around opportunities, exposure to diverse backgrounds that force you break out of your own stereotypical thinking...

2.2 Idealogy

> The most “woke” people are the ones who aggressively try to silence all dissent and to exclude conservatives, libertarians, etc., from the Academy.

This is a myth. Conservatives tend to get excluded because their whole goal is to exclude others based on their religion, their desire to prevent others from being able to become self actualized (ex against same sex marriage), their support for laws and institutions that maintain the status quo...

2.3 Other countries

> the most diverse people would naturally be those from other countries.

Yikes. He's totally gone off the rails now. Completely misses the point of what DEI is about.

2.4 Other races

> Affirmative action would also apply more strongly to, say, immigrants from Iran, or Korea, or Israel, than to black people (or anyone else) from our own society.

face palm that is just so painful to read. Yes, on the surface it's true, but not what DEI is actually trying to address in the US.

2.5 social class

> rural white people would get more affirmative action points than middle class suburban blacks.

lol this guy doesn't understand racism very well.

2.6 Proportionality

His point: you don't need a proportional representation for diversity.

And...? Not sure why this is even here. Seems pretty obvious.

2.7. Non of this is happening

> Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy.

lol my god how did we land here?

3. Conclusion

> “Diversity, inclusion, and equity” refers to ideological uniformity, exclusion, and discrimination.

Sigh. He really has no clue what he's writing about or how this works outside of his world view. I can't shake the feeling how sad I from having slogged through this. I'll chalk this up to being useless noise that's out of touch on what's going on in the larger world.

In general the argument template is "If you're not 100% committed to realizing a more extreme version of your mission statement than the status quo, then you're being hypocritical and cannot be taken seriously." We see the same thing pop up in, "You don't like capitalism, yet you still participate in it," and "You don't like cars, yet you still drive places." It's the sort of tired teenager type argument that doesn't seek to advance the discourse. It does nothing to convince anyone of anything and instead it exacerbates division. There's plenty of other better arguments to make and for some reason the author goes for this one.

So here's where I'm stuck: On the one hand I totally understand the objections to categorizing people based on things that won't affect their job performance per se -- skin color, gender, who they are attracted to, etc.

But on the other hand, those people have been systematically discriminated against, well, forever.

So the question is, where should the fix be applied? If the only people who have the skills to do the job you are hiring for are straight white men, because they are the only ones who had the opportunity to get the training, should we fix that at the hiring level?

The initial reaction is probably no, we should push that fix further down to make sure those people get the same chances as everyone else. But that will take decades. What do we do until then?

And there is another thing too -- you can't deny that a black woman has had a vastly difference life experience than a white man, even if those two people have all the same job relevant qualifications otherwise. And frankly I'd rather have the black woman on the team to offer that perspective, especially for product decisions, because they might have interesting things to say.