Tell HN: DEI initiatives undermine the self esteem of PoC within a company

When you view everything through a racist lens, that's all you'll see -- it'll consume you.

I was proposing an alternative way to read the racism in the NBA (rather than overcoming racism, it was used as a ploy to increase revenues - oh hey, they opened the Chinese markets in 2010 https://lawaspect.com/nba-expansion-china/). In fact, in your prior post you were discussing all these forms of racism Lin faced without clear evidence (i.e. an email, paper trail, etc). That's what DEI is, people utilizing their race to shame others in attempt to gain wealth, power, etc. Ultimately, it's about claiming something is deserved due to your race; which in fact is no different than the opposite. From your prior post:

> DEI is about saying, "you've done a sufficiently good job of demonizing everything that comes from POC -- so that you immediately discount the way they walk, talk, where they go to HS, go to college, etc... But set aside these biases and try to let some in the front door to at least give them a chance at the interview. Try not to assume because they went to Howard they are less than."

Almost everyone agrees you should set aside the bias, but why give someone an interview based on their race? Why not equally pick at random from people at that point?

Regardless, what we were talking about were diversity quotas in management. Typically, that means promotions from within. Everyone had interviews, everyone has been working. DEI in the example I gave was a way to extract more power / wealth for a given group in the name of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion -- at the exclusion of others.

> And you thought your old boss was a bigot??

When you promote [or don't] based on race, what are you?

> the systemic oppression of a racial group to the social, economic, and political advantage of another

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism

You love to dismiss anything with the appearance of racism, except when it negatively might impact white males. Than racism and bigotry is suddenly a huge problem.

And like Lin, people aren’t saying to promote based on race. But rather don’t neglect people based on race which is exactly what people like you do. I’d love to see the candidate pool randomly drawn from the general population. I bet you’d find problems with it.

1. A schema of the world as an unfair arrangement of oppression and coercion

2. The claim to a correct understanding of how this system operates and perpetuates istelf

3. The belief that contrary thoughts and beliefs, however sophisticated they sound, are a simple product of these more fundamental power relations, which must be unmasked

4. A plan for how to make everything better through transformative change, which includes a radical remodeling of the self to expunge wrong belief and wrong thinking

5. A totalizing belief that everything falls within this ideological universe of discourse. You can't go off and study butterflies or Taylor series and tap out of the battle.

This is the shape of the "thing" that makes people see a similarity between modern elite belief and Marxism. I'm not familiar enough with fascist ideology to answer your question, but consider that fascism was a pretty incoherent and fast-changing target, while the core beliefs of Marxism have shown remarkable staying power despite a body count that would have doomed lesser belief systems (like fascism!). Note also that, with small changes, the schema I gave above is a religious schema; part of the power of totalizing ideology is that it plugs into the mental and spiritual machinery of religious faith.

I really cannot overemphasize how detrimental to your argument what you just wrote is to any thinking human being. Blindly claiming all research, from literally every institution in the world, is both inaccurate and rigged somehow on a widely studied topic, is an insane claim only made when you've given up on the entire concept of rationality.

You really would rather throw all of science under the bus before you let black people get an even footing in society, wouldn't you? Incredible.

Would Crenshaw agree that Fanon is the beginning and end of CRT? Race, Reform, and Retrenchment[1] contains an extended, detailed critique of Critical Legal Studies for instrumentalizing and superficializing Black struggle, and for the premise that in a conflict between avoiding legitimizing the dominant class (in the broader Gramscian sense) and advancing Black material interests, it's Black interests that need to give.

For that matter, you can go back to Crenshaw's Demarginalizing the Intersection[2] and see that (a) it is in the main a par-for-the-course case-by-case legal case study like lots of other law articles, and not an inscrutable blob of woke jargon, and (b) not especially Marxist? (Amusingly, this article was weaponized, with Crenshaw's approval, by Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders).

[1]: https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/Cren... [2]: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?arti...