It's unfortunately tough to have a discussion about this too. Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person. Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it. I was attending a JEDI workshop as a grad student to get a diversity certificate at the time, and the facilitator only reacted with disgust, and we never honestly discussed it.
The suspicion is that inclusion of these diversity statements in the hiring process is a way to stealthily discriminate on the basis of race when it is ostensibly illegal to do so.
I'm unfamiliar with US colleges, but could this just be a scheme to allow wealthy or well connected people to get into positions without the grades part? It would otherwise be pretty easy to show unjust discrimination if it were only grades being considered, but an applicant's 'diversity score' could mean anything, and is arbitrary on purpose to justify approving just about anybody.
Agreed, much like the "personality score" that Harvard notoriously used to the detriment of Asian applicants. It could very well also be that the children of wealthy donors just happen to have good personalities.
Prop 209 bans racial discrimination, but UC does it in hiring anyway through a number of means. For example, although Prop 209 bans taking race into account in the hiring decision, it doesn't ban taking it into account in earlier phases, like preparation of shortlists. If a department's shortlist for hiring a professor is found to have a bad proportion of under-represented minorities, the department can be punished by informal means such as being denied future hires. There are several other tricks that the administration does to promote race-based hiring and admissions, with the overall effect that Prop 209 is nullified through policies that are never put into writing.
Because it was used to achieve diversity goals, and 209 prevents that. Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies). Whether or not this is the right way to go about it is indeed a split issue evidenced by the 57/43 2020 vote and 55/45 vote that passed the original 96 proposition.
> Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies).
Reparations would at least be a coherent policy. But Prop 16 proponents also want the policies to favor Latinos, who given the demographics of California would by far be the primary beneficiary of such policies. But Latinos enjoy similar income mobility to whites. Favoring Latinos over whites isn’t “reparations” but just straight up racial discrimination. Ironically, Prop 16 was voted down in every single Latino-majority county in the state.
Ya, this is why I gave myself the out by saying it’s a divisive topic- a lot would be solved by having specifics for reparation laid out and a deadline for when such would end, but such a policy is likely to have so much against it (too much v not enough, general dissident for giving away money, whether or not it would even be legal on the basis of discrimination) that proxy bills that move the needle (somewhat) with (somewhat) negative side-effects are what we end up with.
If you’re going to discriminate based on skin color, it seems to me that a narrower policy that applies to the 6% of California that’s black would be an easier sell than a broader policy that ropes in the additional 40% that are Latino.
I think there’s a simpler explanation: most of the people behind Prop 16 are racist. Their only knowledge of race is the black-white dichotomy and they categorize Latinos as black for political purposes because that's the only framework they have for thinking about people with dark skin.
> Like the point made here[0], it's de-facto reparations by advantaging those who were/have been affected by lost generational wealth (unequal schools and racist HOA & loan policies).
Does anyone actually check whether recipients of these de facto reparation actually have been affected by any of that? As far as I can tell, nobody does, because nobody cares, it’s literally just based on the skin color.
The loss in generational wealth is effectively based on skin color. For example, in the 1930's, the Home Owner's Loan Corp. mapped out and literally redlined black areas, making it harder for homes to be bought and sold without paying extra in interest[0]. From Wikipedia[1]:
> The effects of redlining, as noted in HOLC maps, endures to the present time. A study released in 2018 found that 74 percent of neighborhoods that HOLC graded as high-risk or "hazardous" are low-to-moderate income neighborhoods today, while 64 percent of the neighborhoods graded "hazardous" are minority neighborhoods today. “It’s as if some of these places have been trapped in the past, locking neighborhoods into concentrated poverty,” said Jason Richardson, director of research at the NCRC, a consumer advocacy group.
The linked page[0] goes into more detail about how disastrous this was and the impact on wealth it has to this day. Considering how neighborhoods were even less integrated then than they are now, it's safe to say the correlation of redlining to skin color was very high.
> The loss in generational wealth is effectively based on skin color.
For many black skinned people in America, sure. For all? Certainly not. There are millions of African immigrants and their descendants in America, who have not experienced any of this. Does anyone bother to differentiate them from the American descendants of slaves? No, it really is all about skin color.
Except that some of the ethnic groups (Asian Americans) that are being discriminated against by this policy were also discriminated against by redlining back then.
>I'm unfamiliar with US colleges, but could this just be a scheme to allow wealthy or well connected people to get into positions without the grades part?
The "grades part"?
We are talking about academic positions here, not student applications.
It is not a suspicion, as suspicion would indicate there is a chance discrimination might not be happening; when d&i literally is discrimination, by definition.
It seems like you are expected, as a staff member in a position to influence the diversity of your workplace and of the students whose educational experience you exercise power over, to do so in a manner consciences of issues of diversity, not even just in general, but in the specific context of your job.
I mean, just for instance, a low '1' rank is described as, among other things: (*my emphasis*)
> Defines diversity only in terms of different areas of study or different nationalities, but doesn’t discuss gender or ethnicity/race. Discusses diversity in vague terms or platitudes. Does not provide any evidence of having informed themselves about diversity. *May discount the importance of diversity.*
I mean - yeah, I wouldn't want someone who fits that description being in charge of my education, or my kid's education - I wouldn't even want to be around a coworker who fits that description. I'm not even sure how well it would work trying to be friends with someone like that - I mean, in this day and age? How could you possibly excuse being so irresponsibly underinformed of such an important issue?
Compare that to a high '5' rank: (again *my emphasis*)
> Clear knowledge of experience with, and interest in dimensions of diversity that result from having URM identities. This understanding can result from personal experiences *as well as an investment in learning about the URM experiences of those with identities different from their own* ... Comfort discussing diversity-related issues (including distinctions and connections between diversity, equity, and inclusion), both in writing, and in a job talk session and one-on-one meetings with students, staff, and faculty.
I mean - that sounds really good doesn't it? Why shouldn't that skill set make someone a more attractive candidate to hire? Isn't that all good stuff that we would all benefit from more people being well-versed in? Doesn't demonstrating that well-versedness indicate a willingness to put the work in, as required to help actively oppose systemic oppression and bigotry? (as opposed to merely paying lip service to an ideal?)
I don't know a single person who has anything genuinely thoughtful or insightful to say on these topics that I would describe as "comfortable" discussing them in the current environment.
You'd have to be exceedingly naive to feel like you can include any amount of nuance into the prevailing narrative, let alone push back against it, without opening yourself up to a slew of mendacious attacks on your character. In many places you can, but within academia or certain corners of the media it's downright risky. There seems to be a rotating example of the day of poorly informed and hyper-reactive school administrators coming down hard on faculty based on nothing at all. Like most recently, the thing with the images of Muhammad being shown in an Islamic history seminar with warnings included in the syllabus and before the lecture being attacked as "Islamophobic."
Nobody is ever comfortable talking about this stuff unless they're up on the current jargon and issues and willing to parrot whatever the approved dogmas and shibboleths of the moment happen to be.
And yet plenty of people ranked high enough that they were hired. Just because you and the people you know wouldn’t have qualified, doesn’t meant that the qualification is unworthy.
I don’t personally know a single union master craftsman carpenter, but I have no problem acknowledging their existence, or their market value to employers. Why should this skill set be any different?
Yes all of the problems you mention are real - so why should an employer not specifically look to hire individuals who are equipped to face them? Like seriously, in what other industry would you protest the necessity of being conversant in applicable jargon? If I walk into a technical interview, and they ask me to use a ternary statement to assign an enum value to a constant based on whether the result of performing a spread operation on a collection of tuples yadda yadda yadda… do you really think my smug “I don’t keep up on shibboleths and dogma” is going to make me look like an appealing candidate?
They’re asking that applicants demonstrate their awareness of the current lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression. Why should lack of awareness and lack of ability or willingness to engage with these issues be attractive when hiring? these are important issues, the handling of which are essential to the continued effort to reverse the effects of bigotry in our country. You might not want to do the work yourself, but that doesn’t mean the work doesn’t need to be done, and it doesn’t mean there aren’t people out there who are much better qualified than you and I to do it.
> They’re asking that applicants demonstrate their awareness of the current lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression.
Because it's not the lay of the land when it comes to systemic oppression. It's the lay of the land as perceived by a clade of under-qualified and unaware administrative functionaries. These people are operating off vibes and public outcry, not any research or evidence backed understanding of history or sociology or policy analysis. The images of Muhammad example is a perfect case because that's exactly what happened. The DEI initiatives were used as a cudgel by the most extreme elements of Islamic movements to impinge on the academic freedom of the professor, and they just dressed up their highly conservative point of view in DEI jargon to manipulate the administration into taking action against her. But all the Muslims who did not agree with that perspective, as well as most scholars of Islamic history, had way more nuanced perspectives on the issue that agreed with the professor. This is basically just an instrument for the administration to erode worker power among an already beleaguered and exploited labor force.
It's also not really germane to most of their disciplines. It would be like asking a mathematician about their knowledge of epidemiology during the COVID pandemic. Why would I expect that of a mathematician? I expect them to do math and to follow whatever directives the public health experts tell them to.
I don't actually think conscripting random people whose core expertise is not policy or equity into doing bootleg equity initiatives are actually going to result in very good policies or a very accurate understanding of equity or diversity issues. I think what it actually ends up getting you is more people who operate off vibes and truthiness they picked up from social media instead.
The issue isn't that people care about diversity or equity, the issue is that this is done in such ham-fisted, lazy, and counterproductive ways. This all suggests they don't care enough about the thing in itself, they care about showing off that they're doing something so everything just revolves around optics instead of outcomes.
I've got opinions about the Muhamad picture incident, but just to check, we're talking about the one at Hamline University, right?
As to whether it's germane to their disciplines - my understanding is that it's germane because of the position they are in as educators, as employees of educational institutions, not because of their particular discipline. Of course you don't need to need to know anything about the modern concept of diversity to be a mathematician - you need that concept to be an effective teacher. Every one of those people in that class room is a whole person, with an entire life leading up to that day of attendance - "Why would I expect that of a mathematician?" - because you should expect that of everyone, but especially of people in positions of power, who have the ability to either reinforce or disrupt systems of oppression. That's the angle.
Me too - but crucially, that isn’t the way the world is right now. That’s what this criteria is about - not just viewing race as irrelevant, but being aware of all the unjust ways in which race has been made to be relevant, specifically so you know how to work to reverse that racist element. The thing about systemic racism is that it persists even after the founding racists are long gone - it’s self-perpetuating. It requires hard work and determination to dismantle.
It’s essentially the argument against “I don’t see colour” - the problem is that modern racists and the legacy of racism persists whether you see colour or not, and the targets of systemic oppression continue to experience repercussions whether you personally target them or not.
In other words, they don’t want employees to simply opt out of racism - that’s comparatively easy. They want employees to actively work against racism. That’s harder, and more worthy, and in my opinion worth actively seeking in new hires, especially in areas like education, politics, health and social services, and real estate that have an outsized impact on the accessibility of the American dream.
It’s not asking employees to pass a test to prove they’re not racist - it’s asking employees to be actively equipped to fight racism as part of their job description. Think of it like being hired for a UX/UI position - are you educated on Dark Patterns in user flows, and can you show experience in identifying and reversing them?
My feeling is the diversity statement would not be a good place to state your position on the controversy, so much as it would be a good place to demonstrate your understanding of the controversy itself. Your comment comes off as flippant dismissal, which I think we both know would not be received well.
I’m willing to bet 99% of the people commenting on this thread have never read a single diversity statement, let alone dozens. I’ve read many, and showing a basic understanding of the controversies and struggles is a good example of what you should do in a diversity statement. The high rate of rejections here come from people who don’t want to even think about diversity, and just want to do their research project. They write sarcastic, flippant, unserious and uninformed essays.
Unfortunately for them, the job includes teaching a diverse classroom, so applicants who don’t give serious consideration on how they will do a critical aspect of the job, or even what are the salient issues, are rejected. This is true of any job.
The opinion piece you cited made the mistake of citing its source.
It misrepresents what happened at Cal. Candidates were not rejected on the basis of their statement, which was merely one factor in scoring the 800+ candidates they interviewed.
> A total of 993 applications were received, of which 893 met basic qualifications. The LSI Committee conducted a first review and evaluated candidates based solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion. Only candidates that met a high standard in this area were advanced for further review, narrowing the pool down to 214 for serious consideration.
What was misrepresented? "Evaluated solely on contributions to diversity, equity and inclusion [sic]" is not quite the same as evaluated solely on their diversity statement, but it doesn't seem too far off the mark. Aside from the candidates' diversity statement, how would the bureaucrats evaluate their "contribution to diversity, equity, and inclusion"?
As far as the effect on applicant demographics, here's the stats before the diversity evaluation / After diversity evaluation:
I note nothing in there about Rich / Poor or anything similar.
It's interesting (by which I mean utterly unsurprising and completely typical but in a revealing way) that social class and money are not considered for "diversity" and are, in fact, rather pointedly ignored. This debunks the whole thing, but I'm sure the proponents will be incapable of understanding why.
> The candidates were reviewed based on their "contributions to diversity, equity, etc." They were not reviewed based on their DEI statements.
And what does this mean, besides reviewing their DEI statements? We know that review of diversity statements are one component of this - you keep alluding to the notion that there's more to it than that, but neglect to actually provide any such example of how the universities measured this contribution besides their diversity statement.
> This is a fancy way of saying that they used affirmative action to advanced African American, Hispanic, and Native American candidates.
This is illegal in California. This is why people speculate that the review of diversity statements is a smokescreen for universities to illegally discriminate on the basis of protected classes.
> you keep alluding to the notion that there's more to it than that, but neglect to actually provide any such example of how the universities measured this contribution besides their diversity statement.
Many ways. For one there’s an interview where such topics can be probed. For another there are various talks given, where candidates can expand on their DEI activities. Finally there are grant applications and grant activities which relate to DEI that can be evaluated.
Considering affirmative action is explicitly illegal in California, I would hope that it wouldn't be the case of candidates being advanced solely by race, and that the diversity statements are what is being considered the 'contribution' here, unless there are some loopholes in the law that I'm not aware of.
In California, affirmative action is only illegal with respect to university admissions (meaning students), not with respect to hiring.
Race-conscious hiring is allowed if it would increase under-represented minorities. Whether you agree, or disagree with this policy (which I think most of us do), it is nonetheless legal in California, and it is what happened at the UC schools mentioned in the opinion piece you cited.
Fun fact: Berkeley and UCLA each employ more conservative professors than most "conservative" schools do. But they employ real conservatives, not the modern snowflake conservatives that constantly portrays themselves as victims.
Not good. For one, it's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race and gender. And second, contrary to what seems to men common belief, Asian and white people don't just have opportunities served up to them on a silver platter (in fact on the axis of gender, job opportunities have not only reached disparity but inverted: millennial and Gen Z women outperform their male counterparts). The academic job market could not be further from "innumerable additional opportunities."
This kind of comment serves as incredibly good ammunition for people looking to stir up racial resentment.
> in fact on the axis of gender, job opportunities have not only reached disparity but inverted: millennial and Gen Z women outperform their male counterparts
This is likely due to age. Things shift when women start having kids. What you observe is also true of childless women versus childless men of certain ages. It does not hold as broadly for women and men with children, in the same age range.
What you're referring to is the ongoing wage gap (women paid less than men) due to having time out to have kids.
The point being, women aren't paid less than men for no reason, just that they take time out to have children, that interruption is what leads to the pay gap.
> white and asian folks absolutely do have more opportunities than other racial groups, and that’s borne out over and over again, whenever people look into these kinds of things. If you look at academic outcomes, black, hispanic, native american groups are still substantially further behind than white and asian groups.
You haven't proven differential opportunity. You've only proven that some groups outperform other groups. You have not proven whether this is due to opportunities, discrimination, or hard work. Asian students, for example, spend more than 3x as much time studying as Black students.[1] Do you think there's a chance that this contributes to their higher representation at Caltech?
If your cultural group is substantially underrepresented in academia, why would you participate in academics? If you know the game is rigged against you, it’s perfectly reasonable not to play.
I wonder what black study rates would be if they were given the same chances as white and asian people are. Hopefully we’ll get there, but we’re still a long way off.
Indeed, Black Americans have suffered slavery and discrimination after emancipation. But is that the primary cause of the continued underperformance of African Americans into the 21st century? Plenty of peoples have come to America dispossessed, only to thrive and even exceed the average fortunes of white Americans - such as Cuban Americans like myself, Jewish people, and Asian Americans. African immigrants similarly excel, despite outwardly appearing the same as American born Black people. The difference is that we don't disempower these cultures by giving them lowered expectations: my parents never told me I should expect unequal treatment on account of my Latin heritage and I'd be insulted by anyone who would.
At this point, I doubt we'll make much progress toward resolving disparities in Black achievement without fostering equal investment in education in those communities. So long as Black students spend on average about half and one third as much time on homework as compared to white and Asian students respectively [1] the gaps academic performance aren't going anywhere. We can try to paper these over with more permissive expectations for admitting underrepresented students, but that has knock on effects: chiefly students admitted on account of affirmative action are less likely to major in STEM and more likely to drop out [2]. In this regard, affirmative action exacerbates underrepresentation in employment sectors as students that want to major in STEM are mismatched and change majors to graduate.
I'm honestly struggling to figure out how you think anyone who disapproves of racial discrimination is ignorant of slavery and the struggle for civil rights. Is your worldview really so narrow that you assume anyone who disapproves of racial discrimination is ignorant of slavery and anti-Black discrimination?
You keep citing this "hours of study" idea like I haven't already addressed it; when you see academic effort squashed by racism, it's no wonder at all that you stop studying. Fix racism in academia, fix the study gap, it's that simple.
Affirmative action does not exacerbate underrepresentation in employment sectors at all; if anything it improves representation, as more minority students are given a chance at completing college, which changes the makeup of eligible employees towards a more equitable mixture.
And I feel the need to remind you of slavery as you do seem wholly ignorant of its existence and further relevance to this topic. My citations are not generic "Slavery existed" citations, they're "slavery existed and to this very day has a gigantic impact on black people in academia. citations.
You are wrong, and harmfully so. You can continue to be wrong, but as long as you are, you also continue to be harmful.
> Fix racism in academia, fix the study gap, it's that simple.
If this were the case, the study gap would have disappeared decades ago. But it persists nonetheless. On second thought, you're probably right but not in the way you think: racial discrimination creates a lowered expectations for underrepresented groups and they put in effort accordingly.
> Affirmative action does not exacerbate underrepresentation in employment sectors at all; if anything it improves representation, as more minority students are given a chance at completing college, which changes the makeup of eligible employees towards a more equitable mixture.
Did you read the paper I linked? Probably not given that you responded 6 minutes after I posted the comment. Racial discrimination does increase representation, but it shifts the concentration of affected groups out of STEM and into less demanding majors. Before you try to blame this on racism inside the university, understand that the likelihood for students to graduate in STEM is the same across all races for the same level of academic preparedness. An Asian, white, Black, etc. student with 700s on their SAT are equally likely to graduate in STEM, as are students with 600s and 500s. An Asian student and a Black student with 700s on their SAT are just as likely to graduate in STEM. A white and Black student with 500s are less likely to graduate than the former two, but equally likely relative to each other. But due to affirmative action, there's a considerably greater share of black students in the latter situation. Worse yet, since these students often try and fail to graduate in their preferred field they take longer to graduate and come away with more student debt.
> You are wrong, and harmfully so. You can continue to be wrong, but as long as you are, you also continue to be harmful.
And I would say the exact same thing to you. You're wrong and harmfully so. The soft bigotry of low expectations is more subtle, but more insidious. Instead of pushing underrepresented students to invest more time into a academics and compete with their peers as equals, you're advocating that we simply lower standards. You can continue to be wrong, but as long as you are, you also continue to be harmful.
> Not only are you wrong, you're alone. Nearly nobody agrees with you who has worked in this space, the consensus is not on your side. Which is good for me and the push for equity, but is tiresome, cumbersome, and harmful in the meantime.
I find it odd that you don't even know the views of the people you're supposedly supporting. Nearly two thirds of Black people disagree with you. Yet you claim I'm alone in my views despite being in agreement with the majority of Black Americans.
> I always find it funny when people talk about "lowered expectations" Do you realize what you reveal about your own views when you say that? You're telling the world how you see minority groups as "lesser";
I agree: that's exactly why racial discrimination is counterproductive. Do you not see the message you're sending when you expect an Asian student to be in the top 5% and a Black student to be in the top 50% for the same role? Do proponents of affirmative action realize what this says about their views on Black people? And yes, discrimination of this magnitude are what universities are applying: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
> Affirmative action does not exacerbate underrepresentation in employment sectors at all; if anything it improves representation, as more minority students are given a chance at completing college, which changes the makeup of eligible employees towards a more equitable mixture.
It creates mismatch. The result is predictable. The "beneficiaries" of affirmative action have lower GPAs and are less likely to complete STEM majors because they are outmatched by students for whom the admissions bar was not bent.
Does it increase representation? At a point in time, yes. But if the goal is to get folks into the executive suite, affirmative action may actually be a step backward.
No one denies that bad things were done to African Americans. We're trying to figure out what slavery or Jim Crow has to do with whether a Black student in 2023 decides to study or not.
My people have been oppressed for centuries. Most people come from people that have been oppressed for centuries. It doesn't factor into how much I study.
You should check out John McWhorter, who has a very different take on what it is to grow up Black these days. I have no idea whether you're Black, or how old you are. But the characterization you give is out of step with what a lot of people perceive. Folks like John find these sort of descriptions borderline offensive. Also demoralizing to Black kids, who shouldn't be told that the world is more awful than it actually is.
Except hard work will help you succeed academically if you're black. In fact, it'll help you a lot more than if you're Asian or white. A Black applicant in the top 9th decile academically has over 50% chance of being admitted to Harvard, as compared to under 10% for an Asian student with the same academic achievement: https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/06/23/a-lawsuit...
If what you are saying were true we should be seeing Asians spending the least time studying and Black students studying hard. But your hypothesis is not only untrue, it's the opposite of what we actually observe.
Yeah but getting to that level despite all of the shit holding black people (and other minority groups) back is insanely hard. So yeah, once you're there it probably gets a bit easier, but getting there is nearly impossible.
What we do see are the systemic effects of an entire society normalizing a whole host of racist behaviors, including trying to play the struggle Olympics by comparing one racial group (who have a whole different set of issues) to another.
Comparing racial groups' admissions prospects isn't racist. It's just inconvenient to your narrative that Black students aren't rewarded by academic success because it so starkly demonstrates that it's not only untrue, but the opposite of true. A Black student needs to be squarely in the middle of the pack to have the same admissions chances as an Asian student in the top 10%. I'm baffled as to how you can convince yourself that Black students aren't rewarded for academic success - it's greater reward for the same level of academic success.
Your who premise that Black students are not rewarded for academic success - which other commenters asked you to substantiate and you refused [1] - is untrue, and you've resorted to accusations of racism instead of trying to argue your point.
I didn't say it was racism, I said it was bad logic. If there is an issue giving black people opportunities, it makes no sense to only measure the black people who already find their way into success despite the hurdles.
That literally does not make sense logically.
And I didn't refuse to do shit, I literally gave a dozen sources that all support my claim that black people have a whole host of things working against them when it comes to performing well academically. I disagreed that I haven't "proven" what I claimed when I very clearly and undeniably did exactly that.
What evidence do you have that hard work won't help you succeed academically today? Plenty of minority students have succeeded in academics through hard work. And how is that Asians managed to avoid this problem as a group? They didn't face any discriminitation?
And my grandparents either didn't live within 1,000 miles of me or died before the 3rd grade. Yet I learned algebra all the same.
Your links don't actually substantiate the claim that you're making. That's why people keep asking you to substantiate the claims that you're making about lower reward for the same level of academic success, and why your continuous referral back to these links is pointless. And now you're resorting to flagging comments because you can't refute them.
If my comments are so toxic, the correct course of action as per the HN guidelines is to not respond - which you have evidently not done.
> I didn't once call anyone here a racist person.
Yes, you did, here [1]
> What we do see are the systemic effects of an entire society normalizing a whole host of racist behaviors, including trying to play the struggle Olympics by comparing one racial group (who have a whole different set of issues) to another.
You wrote this in response to my comparison of Asian and Black admission rates, in response to your claim that Black people are not rewarded for academic success. In your response explicitly called the comparison of racial groups racist. Sure, you didn't call me racist. You just called what I did in the previous comment racist - as though I can't connect the dots.
The whole point of this thread is that black kids don't try to study because of past racism.
You now want to tell black kids that everything's shit so there's no point trying, then point to the inevitable result of that lack of effort as racism? Are you not the racist?
Society? You tell me. They aren't getting the grades because they aren't studying. They aren't studying because.....?
You atleast appear to support this 'truth' telling, regardless of the self fulfilling outcome.
Sorry what? That's not how affirmative action works at all, you have to be qualified for a given spot, the whole point is that there are way too many qualified candidates as it is.
Go commented:
> Asian students, for example, spend more than 3x as much time studying as Black students.[1] Do you think there's a chance that this contributes to their higher representation at Caltech?
To which you replied:
>If your cultural group is substantially underrepresented in academia, why would you participate in academics? If you know the game is rigged against you, it’s perfectly reasonable not to play...
So are they expected to 'play the game' or not?
Define qualified? If a get an E (technically a pass) am I 'qualified' to the same extent as someone with an A?
If I get my basic baseball proficiency badge does that allow me to play against the best baseballers the world has to offer? Just because of my race?
Further. You do understand the future danger of all this? If I'm looking to hire graduates and I know the black kids had an easier time getting in. If I want the best im better off not looking at the black kids. Their piece of paper is worth less.
Plus you're infantalising them. They should be getting there on their own merits. If they aren't doing the work to get the grades, that issue should be addressed, not papered over.
Black kids didn't have an easier time getting in, it's a lot harder for a black person to get to the place where they're even being considered for a prestigious college than it is for you to get to that place.
If you see a black person with an education from an institute like Harvard, you should think about the additional work they had to do to get there.
And by the way, those kids get the grades necessary to attend these schools. Why would you presume they don't?
But the whole point is that others have been putting in more effort thus the better outcomes.
Your position is/was that black kids put in less effort because racism.
So if black kids are putting in less effort because racism how can you then say they're putting in more work.
If they're trying and not getting in then that's something universities should be doing something about. If they aren't putting in the work universities shouldn't just be expected to accept lower grades. And the solution lies elsewhere.
You can't have it both ways. Either theres no point trying because the game is rigged. Or they're putting in more effort to get to the same position. If the latter then challenge the GPs assertion, instead of tacitly accepting it by saying that black kids aren't trying.
If you actually read the thread we are in, the reply this is under, which I have requoted, you will see this is on relation to education and study time.
Are you claiming revising for an exam doesn't lead to better outcomes?
> Yes good, because white and asian folks absolutely do have more opportunities than other racial groups, and that’s borne out over and over again, whenever people look into these kinds of things. If you look at academic outcomes, black, hispanic, native american groups are still substantially further behind than white and asian groups.
Group A outperforming Group B does not mean that Group A is being given unfair opportunities. It certainly doesn't justify intentionally, and illegally, giving Group B undeserved opportunities to the detriment of Group A.
It absolutely does mean that group A is being given more opportunities than group B when you realize there is no difference biologically between group A and group B.
Yes, in a world where those two groups have the exact same make up, it would mean that. That's not true at all in this context. There are differences between racial groups. No one is shocked and appalled that Jewish people are hugely over represented as Nobel prize winners, or that black people are wildly over represented in professional sports. It's difficult to disentangle what is just cultural impact, but they're patterns that a child could identify.
If you work from a false premise, you end up with false results. The motivation behind the desire to believe that everyone is equally capable at everything is a good one, and individuals should be treated as if they have equal potential regardless of their immutable characteristics. It would be great if all groups were great at everything. If it were possible, I would make it so. However, falling prey to treating "ought" as "is" leads to pathological behaviors, which is exactly what is happening to the well-intentioned members of this movement.
This is not true, genetically, and if you believe there is, that's a real problem for you.
As for the differences in these communities as a result of differing treatment by others, you're damn right there are differences, and to the degree that those differences are caused by discrimination and hatred (and it's a high degree), that's exactly what we're trying to slowly improve.
The problem with your egalitarian vision is that not everyone starts out on the same level, and if you ignore the systemic ways people are held back, you ruin any shot you might have at getting the end goal you seem to want, which seems to be "may the best person win".
We all want that end result, but until you deal with reality, that's never going to happen.
And why do those cultural differences exist? What bonds "black people" together in American culture, despite coming from a whole host of diverse places that otherwise share little to no culture amongst one another?
>...ways of using the statements by reading them _prior_ to any other components of the application, scoring them using a rubric of their choice, and deciding which applicants to consider further using the entirety of the application. Exercising their discretion, faculty on some committees elected to move most applicants forward, while others (especially from the large colleges) preferred to continue with less than 50% of the original applicant pool.
So based solely on the DEI statement, some have rejected over 50% of applicants without taking the rest of the application into consideration.
In other words, UC Berkeley rejected 76 percent of qualified applicants without even considering their teaching skills, their publication history, their potential for academic excellence or their ability to contribute to their field. As far as the university knew, these applicants could well have been the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk, or they might have been outstanding and innovative educators who would make a significant difference in students’ lives.
Welcome to the historical experience of numerous underprivileged people who were excluded through no fault of their own. But since DEI statements can be rewritten at any time, applicants are not stuck with the prospect of permanent exclusion.
I am not a fan of college administrators in general, nor of the heavy-handed bureaucratic approach described here. But administrators are looking for faculty who can produce more distinguished grads in the future, who might be 'the next Albert Einstein or Jonas Salk'. You could be an outstanding brain in your field, but if you're not interested in maximizing the search for undiscovered talent, are you likely to attract it to your school?
> Welcome to the historical experience of numerous underprivileged people who were excluded through no fault of their own.
Emphasis on historical. You have to make sure not to swing the pendulum too far, otherwise you'll just end up creating a new generation of aggrieved people. Especially if your actions are themselves illegal.
I think framing DEI policies and initiatives as unassailable is what scares people more than the policies and initiatives themselves.
Of course, many people would react negatively to someone saying flat-out “diversity is bad”, especially because people with those opinions tend to be coming from a place where that’s a toned-down version of more abhorrent views.
But, people with more measured criticisms of specific policies get lumped in with the first set. So because it’s very hard to say “there is a better way to do this” or “this may not have positive systemic effects” or “this does not seem relevant in the context it appears in”, there are few checks and balances, and you get these instances where it’s clumsily shoehorned into things because nobody dared disagree.
I think for many people, this bothers them more than any specific thing.
The way diversity is implemented is bad. It gives power to people on the basis that they are aggrieved and have a higher moral status than others in the same position. So why should we assume that once those people are in, they would voluntarily choose to surrender their own power and status which comes from allegedly being aggrieved?
The whole point of DEI was supposedly to "equalize" things so once you are a beneficiary of a DEI policy, you should no longer be able to claim victim status. In fact, once they get in, they argue for even more grievance policies, power, and special treatment. Often that is specifically what the job is meant to do. What is the real end result of this in particular for universities which are gateways to power? It's not surprising that universities are where this battle is being fought and not fast food or retail jobs.
I expect your diversity and their diversity are intrinsically different concepts. And I think it's a really important distinction to be made. You calling it artificial isn't adequate because what you deem artificial and what they have classified as diversity are more equivocal. And they have the framework to do the mental gymnastics to argue they're right until you're blue in the face, if any definition is concrete it must be theirs.
A lot of these "forward" ideas are undergirded by postmodernist ideology. I think this is interesting on two points, one being that class is almost unanimously ignored, and this was criticised by the communists of the era as being liable to divide the proletariat - and so it is. But also the deconstructivism and conception of language furnishes jointly a strange shibboleth and doublespeak which further promulgates this... Invisible enemy. Unironically, though, most of the social ills which are lambasted as systemic failures are products of class, itself a function of race but only coincidentally - the reality is these things are mostly independent in the US. But when you divide the the poor and the poor and the middle class and the middle class and the poor and the middle class, you get a rapidly deteriorating status quo for everyone.
But it also creates a disruptive interface: When you hear equity as someone who is not strictly apprised of the meaning it sounds good, as does diversity, but their definition lies outside the canon of the English language.
Equity, equ- equal... The implicit connotation of that word, even the definition equality of rights sounds noble to anyone that hears it. But that isn't what they're saying, what they're saying is give someone with an unquantifiable disadvantage (which may not exist at all), based singularly on outward identity, a step up. Nothing to do with legitimacy of hardship or their class, just blatant and racist, sexist, and sexual assumptions. Literally doling out extra credit for being a trans Asian.
And it's all really patronizing, it's all really racist and sexist. Most of all it's performative, and falls hard into Goodhart's Law. Protectionism is paternalistic, but patronizing people is just wanton disrespect towards someone's individual potential. I'm all for helping hands, but now when it isn't inclusive (another term they misuse) and fair.
> But that isn't what they're saying, what they're saying is give someone with an unquantifiable disadvantage (which may not exist at all), based singularly on outward identity, a step up.
That’s not what we are saying.
The DEI efforts at my university at least aren’t about giving disadvantaged people a step up, they’re about raising the bar for everyone, and making sure it’s not lowered for anyone.
In practice, what this means is expanding the applicant pool and not just considering applicants from the ivies. It turns out there are just as good candidates elsewhere, and they will apply to your program or job if you market it to them.
The end result is that you can have a diverse faculty and student body without compromising on quality at all.
Nothing about this process is patronizing, racist, or sexist. The main tool we use is to just not be lazy and out in the extra work to find good candidates. Because they are there. I’m guessing the “performative” aspect you are noticing would be places who don’t want to do the extra work but don’t want to seem like they’re doing nothing. But you can’t conclude that’s what everyone is doing based on your limited experience.
It’s just a new old boys network, except you get different types of infighting. Movements like this aren’t new and always burn out. Once the tribe in charge gets in trouble, it will move on to the next fad. 1990s diversity gave way to late 90s run everything like a business.
If you work in a huge bureaucracy like the University of California, if leaving isn’t practical, you just need to behave and hunker down and focus on what’s productive to you.
I'm not nearly as optmistic. This is bureaucratic entrenchment across many systems and will take a 'movement' to unseat.
The populist paradox is that most people probably disagree with this, but are not willing to stick their necks out, leaving it to those who have nothing left to loose aka the crazies who have populist leaders few of us want to support.
It's a bit like border policy, the vast majority of Americans don't want willy nilly open borders, and recognize that 'it's complicated' but it seems 'one side' doesn't have the tenacity to do much about it and their more radical elements kind of want 'de facto' open borders, but the people screaming about the problem and wanting to 'build a wall' are themselves to angry and radical, not a movement regular people want to be supportive of.
We need calmer heads to prevail.
It may be more possible now that Trump is gone, whatever you think of him he was a least 'polarizing' and put people in a tizzy.
Bureaucracy does whatever it's master wants. I've been acquainted with organizations where these sorts of bureaucracies get usurped by changes at the top. You'll get some variant of crazy, just with different target. It's sad and silly, but what can you do?
The border policy stuff is different. "No" is very simple and easy to understand. You can say "Hey Farmhand Bob, illegal aliens are taking good american jobs" and there's a visceral reaction to it. Never mind that Farmhand Bob's job depends on his boss hiring migrants to get the harvest in. Anything other than "no" is nuanced, and is easily shot down by reactionaries.
Identity bureaucracy is just tribal/sectarian politics.
I'm asking from a sincere position here, so I don't wish to come off sounding antagonistic, but could you explain why the statement "diversity is bad" is wrong?
From my own perspective, the idea of encouraging or endorsing something that hurts unity, cohesion, and understanding. I cannot think of a way in which diversity would not be a bad and damaging thing.
I have, of course, heard comparisons to things like species of dogs, "Mutts are healthier than purebreds", but people aren't dogs. Or the human immune system being able to fight of disease, "Being exposed to different diseases makes your immune system stronger", but people aren't diseases, either. It disturbs me when people are boiled down to those types of inhuman terms. Those types of analogies never really address the issue without comparing it to something that isn't the issue itself. It always seems to fall short. I've never heard of someone explain why encouraging intrinsic division wouldn't be a destructive thing.
I've heard some vague phrases like, "It's good to have different perspectives to appeal to different groups of people", but that seems to be a criticism against diversity, not encouragement for it. It seems to say that diversity is disunity; chaos. That it is a kind of confirmation that different groups do not understand each other at all, and can only communicate through some kind of manufactured means. It just seems like a position that isn't very well thought out.
Again, I hope it doesn't come off sounding some specific way. It seems like it's a topic that's easy to sound hateful on. I don't wish to seem such a way; I've never really understood what it was that people who endorsed diversity were trying to hint at. It's like there's some core concept that's never been said out loud, and there's just been a lot of assumptions built off of that thing that was left unaddressed. I'd really like to understand what that inner thing is.
You are thinking very, very shallowly about this. Diversity has become a goal in many organisations because primarily (1) too much cohesion entails out-groups and that often means racism or other illegal and immoral attitudes and practices thrive, and that is a huge problem both for legal reasons and generally; and secondarily (2) too much cohesion means you aren’t exposed to enough different opinions.
You have apparently only considered reason (2). Your comment then runs the gauntlet of extreme reactions to the idea of diversity. It seems to be because you don’t understand that both cohesion and diversity sit somewhere in the middle of a priority order for most organisations. The only people who agree with where you appear to have placed cohesion in the priority order are the architects of 1930s fascism. The reason saying “diversity is bad” and all the other things you said (“Diversity is disunity. Chaos”) is wrong is because you sound like a fascist. I am not exaggerating. You absolutely do sound like one. That is a prime example of “bad systemic effects” as the comment above said; if you say stuff like this, your organisation will no longer be conducive to anything except violent political movements. You should, in swift order, reconsider how important cohesion is to you and any organisations you’re a part of.
Addendum: you did say you didn’t know how to ask this without sounding hateful. Fair. Pointing out the connection to hateful groups is still appropriate and necessary because the devotion to absolute cohesion was a huge part of what made fascism successful. Saying stuff like you did is a bad way for society to go, good people recognise it and rightly reject it vehemently. So your ideas about cohesion being always preferable to diversity are always going to get this reaction from most, and eventually your organisations will be filled with the remaining people who do agree with your comments, and those people are amenable to hate even if you were originally just trying to get some team spirit going. It is a bad path. So is making your university staff swear allegiance to ideology. The only way forward is a balance of cohesion and diversity.
I’m not sure it’s a smiley face moment for all of us, more just another day on the internet, but thinking about this on your own is good.
One more point to consider is that you might have a mistaken impression of how important idea (2) is in organisations’ views of diversity. Despite the primacy of idea (2) in framing the issue (as in, “diversity is strength” etc), organisations often care about (1) more because the harms from not enough diversity are so stark and obvious and measurable. The benefits of diversity are real, but the toxicity you get from too much cohesion is really dangerous, unproductive, damaging to a company’s hiring and retention ability, and makes your product unattractive if consumers hear about it. (I would cite Travis Kalanick’s tenure at Uber, where “cohesion” seems to have meant “being male”.) But you won’t hear companies talk about that danger, because it would sound like they already have a problem or that they are thinking about this purely in a liability sense or that they feel like they’re being forced to do it which seems like they don’t care. So everyone talks about the potential upside instead, which needs not be measurable in dollars or dramatic, but is regardless a good excuse to take action to avoid the dangers that do have a very concrete cost that these places have learned primarily through the real pain of having done it wrong and run into trouble.
It’s easy to lose sight of that when everyone talks about diversity in flowery terms, but remember this is the marketing-department-approved translation of a century of learnings through civil rights movements, political movements, legal reforms, huge lawsuits, spiralling company failures, and wars over this stuff, and it is all still lurking right there behind the flowery language.
It does not follow. Race itself (since you're using 20th century fascism, read: Nazi) is a singular aspect of diversity. Organization is a poor selection of term, too. Institution is better suited.
It doesn't matter how you mince it the only truly homogeneous populations are at-risk marginalized nomads. With that framed: you can find greedy, lecherous, exploitative, amoral or immoral slouches in every corner of the Earth regardless of race, you can equally find people that you'd invariably frame as noble, selfless, vulnerable understanding humanitarians... and we can fairly posit then, from every race, creed, region and religion you can pull from these pools any imaginable quantity of the human spectra - and I expect anyone else would, and they would elect people deliberately close to their own beliefs and goals because it's necessary to have some alignment within any large organization and especially a society. In fact there's something to be said for religion to affect this conversation, and it's that it permeated every early civilization - and one would rightly point out that's because values were made concrete and "objective".
Now I expect you didn't consider it, but there are a lot of groups that don't share your values. They feel very strongly, to the extent they would kill you and dismember you over it, some would just kill you, maybe torture you beforehand. I mean, that's really diverse is are those individuals you'd want in your institutions? I expect no. Likewise there is not necessarily some imminent moral concern that doesn't at least parallel that: some people don't want to be around other people - values collide because ultimately we live in a relativistic world.
The real problems you described can be chalked up to a few things:
The state: Monopoly on power, disempowers individuals, individuals relinquish their moral obligations including refusal to participate
Nucleated power: Institutions are supposed to act exemplars of behavior, instead they simply are exemplars and people follow, and then more follow suit. Suddenly the Third Reich is marching on Poland. Purpose and moral delegation is performed by institutions that are, due to human limitations, intrinsically unsuitable for the task. Obviously there is the element of controlling incalculable resources like every competing power in WWII had which emerges from this...
Limited options: Individuals and communities are unable to disband from their respective state apparatus e.g. secession due to the imminent threat of violence, retaliation and/or a complete lack of peaceable legislative or political option.
Scale: Dunbar's number, hypothetical maximum of about 150 people for functional human communities. When a neighborhood school in rural America doubles that easily, one is left to wonder how an institution deals with that, it's by mishandling every human it deals with. Catch-22's and C.S. Lewis's hell. People are abstracted into cattle (see Eichmann) or mechanisms in a greater machine, expected to go flawlessly whirring away without question or complaint at the throw of a lever.
It doesn't matter if my friend group is a contractile 10-man squad because we all came from different backgrounds and currently live entirely disparate lives. And we're from one of the most demographically and politically homogeneous states in the US and not one of us has similar views. We're irrelevant because everyone defers to the clueless state, for one, for two we're 10 out of a denominator of millions of hundreds of millions.
The problem is with institutions, and hierarchy, and bona fide power, and the concepts of property on which they're founded which again, circularly is a reference to the deference individuals must grant the state which makes it all fall into disproportion. Nazis couldn't work to found a kingdom without people to participate in their game.
I elected "institution" because there are a lot of voluntary organizations, but an institution is fundamental and intersections with them are inevitable. My friends, my [hypothetical] church, the workout classes organized by some nice lady, the food bank, salvation army... Individuals have mobility and they're able to reject or accept. Institutions your workplace and government - by dint of being necessitous - drastically reduces one's degrees of freedom, limits their mobility, and entraps them to varying extents. That's a real problem. If I don't like Nicaragua they can arbitrarily refuse me a Passport so I can't leave, forcing me to work at a sweatshop, and then the government can hold me at gunpoint to take some fraction of my infinitesimal income.
Anyways, there's different strokes for different folks and there's just as big of a proportion of any "minority group" in every corner of the world that would just as soon self-segregate so they can attend to their communities as there are people who want to live in "diverse" communities in accord with their values. And there's also a lot of performative white guilt bullshit from people who won't bend their ear to a black man, but will naively attempt to run to his "defense" at every opportunity. It's disrespectful.
I think you have failed spectacularly at understanding fascism. It was not only racial purity that they went for. That wasn’t even a thing in Italian fascism, it simply did conformity and allegiance to the state and took that to an extreme. Nazism used racial purity to exclude people from its cohesive in-group and enhance the cohesion that in-group had. It built an extremely cohesive structure that worked at every level to enforce itself. No aspect of life was not subject to this enforcement. You had to demonstrate cohesion everywhere you went. The power to control this was necessarily centralised; there had to be some figure outside the cohesive mass who was not subject to the cohesion enforcement regime, who could interpret the rest of the world and then direct the mass to respond etc. The same can be said of Stalin, and these ideas are all laid out explicitly in the communist “vanguard” doctrine too. The results are not only bad because of the racism, they are also bad because of the day-to-day experience of living under such a regime, the weakness that comes from relying on a single fallible leader to direct the cohesive mass, the waste in rejecting independent minds, the brain drain from smart people leaving, the brutality required to hold all of this together, and finally the destruction it enabled. All of that is true of organisations and “institutions” (a term that excludes companies, by the way!) but with all of the sliders scaled down and the potential harms a little lower because companies don’t have armies.
So yeah, mate, I am very aware that there are groups who would murder me for expressing the views I have on cohesion and diversity. Was that meant to be a threat or just an appeal to tribalism as a natural thing? Everything else you said is… You seem to be grappling with the idea that there are a lot of people in the world. I don’t really see a point emerging from it.
Fascism has been a catch all for "other" forever. Orwell, an expert wordsmith who was present at the time actually described this phenomena not only in terms of the fascist movements but also the Communist movements, crucially, if you read An Homage to Catalonia this actually caused a considerable deal of internal manipulation which was coordinated in such a way that foreign press promulgated [by Orwell's account] false stories.
It was really an economic classification wherein business was subordinated to an authoritarian government. And again to my point, hierarchy, institutions, power, and scale are what lead to the immense destructive forces witnessed in the early 20th century.
And by that logic I don't see a whole lot of distinction between the Axis and Allies - there was a difference in values but hardly one in architecture at the time. There was also the point of aggressors and aggressed which paints moral connotations.
And companies do have armies, really it's private property, but... Companies own all of the property that's valuable. Corporations in particular, which mind you do have a history of directly or indirectly leveraging government power, in some cases military or "intelligence". You don't need an army when you can threaten someone with global sanctions for attempting something like a sovereign default or violation of international IP law. There is no distinction between starving someone out and killing them in war, in fact, that's what war used to consist of. Siege the city and hold the walls, wait and watch as they starve to death and wallow in their own filth as disease creeps in.
Your last point is grasping at straws. You know as well as I do I wasn't specifying you, or your particular values. Stop parading legitimate diversity around as tribalism and painting it, self-righteously, as some inexorably evil idea. I can do the same with your naive globalist cosmopolitanism: whatever intrinsic real diversity does emerge, it's amalgamated into a uniform homogeneity because the elements within are pigeonholed, and expected to behave in a narrow band of "cosmopolitan acceptability". Isn't that what you don't want? One totally uniform population and a flat earth? Politically, nationally, racially, philosophicallt identical, because to me that is the logical conclusion.
Schismogenesis is a self-limiting principal and had ought to be embraced. It would be hard for a continuously dividing society to accrete enough power to do what the West did to the Americas, or colonialism or Pol Pot or Mao or Hitler or the Russian revolution... The scale is the important factor. And those dividing lines that we create in these nuanced differences in value are important by that nature. Some will fail, some will succeed. It's hardly any different than mitosis. Forbidding that from occuring is holding back evolution, isn't it? That was the whole proposition democracy was suppose to solve in the US - it was a laboratory for experimenting with... Everything, and yet the accretion, centralization, scale, and institutionalization has all but defeated that.
I think it would help if you visited a museum instead of reading Orwell dissecting wartime hysteria. That was written in 1944. All people had to go on was propaganda and tiny snippets of reporting on atrocities, of course people in the survey had no idea what the word meant. It serves as nothing more than a caution about words losing their power through overuse, not evidence that the word fascism is actually meaningless. There is actual content in the word and you can use it to refer to its particular brand of totalitarianism and set of methods for imposing and sustaining it. It is worth doing that in order to avoid it happening again because it is a successful formula and there is a danger of that. Maybe it bewilders you, but it seems everything bewilders you. Everything would be easier for you if we all lived in communities of no more than 150 people. You’re free to go and do that up in the hills and leave the rest of us down here.
Orwell fought in the Spanish Civil War, he had a direct view of the interior workings of the politics of these ferments because of that. He was also apprised of the disparate reporting by foreign journals as he made it a point to read them, this is something he writes at length about in Homage.
I would expect that very few people of today would be able to define it accurately. And because of that, yes, it remains a catch-all for "enemy" and lacks meaning aside. Nobody else abides by your methods, just as every "Classical Liberal" fails to label themselves strictly as a "Liberal" as prescribed by Mises (or was it Hayek?). Thus there is a stunning failure to identify internal mechanisms as, at an elementary level, fascistic in both organizations and institutions. It's a pretty considerable failure.
It's a wildly successful formula because we're all doing it and we're ignorant of it because it's a word without meaning and that makes it a contagion of stupidity.
But of course I'm bewildered. Watching people naively building cities housing tens of millions of people, driving millions of cars, rampantly reproducing so that millions more people and millions more cars might grace the congested arteries. Then being so audacious as to complain about pollution and urban sprawl in the same breath as they have their prepared tangerines in light syrup canned in a plastic cup shipped from some developing nation 4000 miles away, but damn that smog! And it's all enabled by what had ought only be described as a fascistic imperialist regime.
Nobody is free to do that, by the way. It's a forced participation scheme. Pay taxes or it's taken, if it's not given violence is deployed. To pay taxes you need money, to get money you must work and make yourself culpable. These are the things that Ghandi railed against and pointed to as agents of moral decay, and likewise Tolstoy - perfect heteronomy by which we can lease all our deference to the state and institutions that make up "civilization" - another ill defined word.
As a simple example: I wouldn't want to work with ten copies of myself. It would magnify my strengths but also my weaknesses. It's much better if a team is comprised by people with different backgrounds, different strengths, different weaknesses. Of course, it is helpful if everyone has some common ground, to facilitate better communication. Diversity in college admissions is one way to create an environment where these sorts of teams can form organically.
Of course, the devil is in the details. I tend not to agree with how most diversity programs are implemented, despite agreeing with the mission.
This always assumes that the primary way people are different is race. A liberal white and a black business major from Princeton who both grew up upper class in the north going to private school probably have much more in common than a poor conservative white guy from a Alabama and a rich liberal one from New York.
That’s one of the reasons why in some circles the “1620 project” and similar interpretations of history are so threatening to some people.
The biggest fear of reactionary types who control resources is that rural poor that trends white and urban poor that trends minority will figure out that they share more common interests and challenges.
The whole schtick is to keep people angry at their neighbor so they don’t notice what they don’t have.
I don’t think we should be down voting this comment even if you disagree. I don’t think we are approaching diversity and inclusion in the right way, but this comment also sounds very wrong to me.
Thank you for the kind words! I do think it's unfortunate that you seem to disagree severely, but I certainly appreciate the concern and thoughtfulness. If you have anything you'd like to add, I'm happy to hear you out, even if we might not agree on it. :)
Honestly, I'm just glad that I haven't received any death threats, so far.
I grew up in a multicultural place. Your comments sound very incorrect to me, diversity is a good thing.
However getting a multicultural society to function is indeed very hard, and many places that aren’t so diverse definitely operate with less conflict.
What I don’t have a good answer for at the moment is if we should be purposely building diverse societies or if we are just trying to make what we have work better.
Some things seem obviously true e.g people should have equal rights and women should participate in the work force.
When we travel we often talk of broadening our horizons. So incorporating new ideas also seems obviously true.
But this mandated bureaucracy seems wrong and unhelpful when you have teaching staff limiting contact with students to minimise the possibility of perceived slights.
> I've never really understood what it was that people who endorsed diversity were trying to hint at.
Active inclusion of members of currently or formerly marginalized peoples. The "inclusion" term of DEI I think more speaks to once the person is inside the group, or sometimes in reaching out to particular outsiders (such as a local community) for input into decisions, because they are also stakeholders.
Anything from pitchforks at the gate, to sympathy for the unfulfilled struggles of other people, to we're leaving talent and opportunities on the table and if we pick it up we'll win over our competitors.
I think the idea is that when you have people from diverse backgrounds they bring unique perspectives to problems to help break out of rigid mindsets that can result from inculturation/monocultures. Take a look at the male model of medicine for an example of this. An eyebrow raising example of this is the "treatment" for "female hysteria" in the 1800s [1].
On the surface it seems reasonable that adding diverse viewpoints to a problem set would result in a higher likelihood of locating an optimal solution, though I haven't seen any real science to support this.
I also haven't seen any studies that have attempted to measure this effect and balance it against the cost of DEI initiatives, all of which are difficult to quantify.
I guess it depends on the context - both the immediate context like whether it’s a university/employer/neighborhood/group of friends, and the cultural context. There are differing views on this but here are mine (wanted to keep it short, but also wanted to keep it comprehensive for those who don’t understand the reasoning):
Speaking as someone in the US, where many disadvantaged groups for a long time were systematically prevented from doing things (like living in a certain area or having a certain kind of job) and represent sizable parts of the population, a lack of diversity often suggests that there is still some kind of inequality causing it. If your institution is big or important enough, people will wonder why those benefitting from it aren’t representative of society as a whole.
A cause that unfortunately still exists, and any respectable person wants to avoid associating themselves with, is when you are just outright excluding or hostile to a particular group. This could vary from outright discrimination to a historical association with discrimination that nobody is actively trying to reverse (such as with country clubs, Greek life). The second one that is much harder to deal with and more pervasive, is when there are not explicit barriers preventing diversity, but rather lingering systemic problems stemming from things like historical discrimination - for example, segregation and redlining created black ghettoes with cyclic poverty and poor educational outcomes that still exist today. Another big one is unconscious bias, like how if you modify the same resume to have a “black sounding” name it may get fewer interviews.
I’m not saying some group of tabletop gamers in rural Minnesota need to go out of their way to find a non-white person to not be racist. I think a lot of people not from the US or from monocultural parts of the US think that’s what being “pro-diversity” means. I don’t think hiring someone with different color skin magically means your team will be more effective either.
In essence it boils down to:
1. Discrimination still exists. Effects from discrimination from the past remain into the present day. Fundamentally nobody should be barred from a job/college because of something like race. And considering the historical injustices that occurred, along with many people harboring those views to the present day or very recently, it’s not enough to not-exclude people - you need to make efforts to actively include people, since they may otherwise think that they “don’t belong” somewhere because of their race.
2. When an institution operates across a broad population, it should try to represent that population. If it doesn’t even come close, this may suggest they are discriminating. Let’s say for instance I start a tech company in the bay area and I only hire white people - with more than a handful of employees that starts becoming astronomically improbable if I’m fairly considering the entire pool of eligible hires.
Also, I think some level of representation is helpful from a simple effectiveness standpoint. Maybe some product doesn’t perform as well on darker skin, or maybe it doesn’t address the needs of a bilingual sub population, or unknowingly commits some cultural faux pas.
3. The huge problem is what to do when outcomes are still very far off from being representative even without any kind of active discrimination. Sometimes this leads to controversial policies. But IMO we shouldn’t let those bad implementations detract from the problem or make us think diversity is bad.
Funny how the largest western nation has made it abundantly clear they have little respect for women and lgbtq rights. Yet, it is the developing countries that are held up as being backwards.
> The problem is that an African cannot replace a European any more than a European could replace an African, for example.
Not entirely understanding what you are attempting to assert with this sentence. What can’t Africans do that only Europeans can?
He means exactly what it is on the surface. An African is not a European in that life in Africa is not the same as life in Europe, thus a person born and raised in Africa is not the same as if the same person had been born and raised in Europe. Thus the difference in values he cites after that.
This seems like a very European perspective and not even responding to the OP’s question about why diversity helps.
Here in the US most of my friends are second generation immigrants - many not white - who are fully assimilated and just as capable as any one else. Diversity is, in my opinion, entirely about making sure those individuals are fairly considered and welcome, even if racist and edgelords think they must be incapable of fitting in because other people of their ethnicity haven’t integrated.
I think you are confusing a rejection of prejudice (treating like people as different based on superficial factors) with desire for diversity (favoring people because of differences).
Many groups have arrived poor to the US and worked themselves up to over-representation in academia and the professions, without intervention. They were not white and not always native English speakers.
To further diversity should their numbers not be limited, to make space for other groups that have not exceled in the same way? If racism is such an endemic problem in the US why have these non-white immigrant groups been able to achieve over-representation in academia, government, and the professions? Why would racists allow a system that harmed rather than benefited themselves.
A lot of stuff around DEI doesn't add up. It feels more like a power grab hiding behind virtue signaling.
Same thing with covid. People with good questions that went against the narrative were lumped up with people spouting the most stupid and awful things. That's a propaganda technique.
There was also a seemingly endless supply of "good questions" where the answers were never deemed acceptable for some long list of reasons, a new reason added to the list every week.
I think at some point a lot of people got fed up trying to give answers to those "good questions" and just settled on "eat shit" and "get the fuck out of my store!" and "I am tired of your shit and I quit!" (or something along those lines lol)
They used to have debates about controversial subjects where the two sides would face-off in front of a crowd.
I think if Fauci and someone really smart like Peter Hotesz would have beat anyone the covid skeptics could have put up and established their credibility and authority in the eyes of the general public by not appearing to run.
One thing Steve Jobs did well was take hard questions in public venues. He didn't always make everyone happy but his willingness to stand for his ideas inspired confidence in the Apple community.
Fauci's lack of willingness to face a respectfully adversarial audience or interview really hurt his perception as a leader. It almost certainly cost many lives.
Jobs was a misanthropist who regularly made coworkers cry, stole their ideas (e.g. Woz and an arcade competition), and was often the target of shareholder revolts or lawsuits (that he usually won).
Fauci attempting that tack would have been disasterous, esp. in the midst of an unknown and (for a while) scary pandemic.
Hell, "be like Jobs" is terrible advice for most businesses, too. Final nail in that coffin was Holmes and Theranos.
Jobs was no saint for sure, but he did build one of the most distinctive brands of all time and rallied a strong development community. Oftentimes that sort of visionary person can be an a-hole. Linus is known to be somewhat ornery too.
Talented debaters are not necessarily honest or knowledgable in their fields.
In fact, being too honest or too nerdy is often a disadvantage. There’s a reason cases on technical matters in courts still get argued my litigators with subject-matter experts as witnesses, not by the SMEs themselves.
JAQing off is a strategy for discrediting expertise by inundating with nonsense questions and accusations disguised as questions. There's no good solution for dealing with bad faith shit-stirring, but dignifying every bit of nonsense with a response isn't going to work.
There were people asking questions who were MDs and PhDs with good records that could have been used.
Refusing to take any adversarial questions also leads to discrediting by the public. The refusal by Fauci and Birx to do so almost definitely caused a needless loss of life. Leaders show competence and rise to challenges. When people see that they're willing to follow.
> Example: the VP of the American Mathematical Society wrote a short piece (op ed?) in 2019 describing the requirement that new university faculty hires write diversity statements, and the scoring of that statement according to a rubric, as a "political litmus test," and she got roasted for it.
They are. And for the “diverse” people themselves they are a sort of minstrel show. The goal is to show off a superficial version of diversity in a way that’s pleasing to white people. For example if you’re Muslim, they want you to one of those Ilhan Omar intersectional Muslims, not one of those billion other Muslims who believes what Islam teaches to be true. Or if you’re Indian immigrant you’ll get a lot further writing about the need for “solidarity between black and brown people” than anything that maps onto how typical Indian immigrants view their experience as a minority.
The irony is that most of Pressley’s “brown voices” sound exactly like white people. It’s a bizarre sort of identity politics where the people who are selected to “represent” different groups don’t advance the views or positions of those groups, but instead lend their identity to advance the views and positions of white allies.
The very question of "are we taking some DEI ideas too far?" is now censored in well known university systems. You cannot even ask questions without persecution, you are treated as a threat to humanity.
This is how I know this is about politics, power, and paychecks.
> Any criticism of justice/equity/diversity/inclusion (JEDI) bureaucracy gets strawmanned very quickly, and the critic labelled as simply a bad person.
Labelled as "A Witch" [1]
> .. and she got roasted for it. Folks called for her resignation, and said the AMS shouldn't have published it.
And what do you do with witches? BURN THEM!
These D.I.E. apparatchiks are no better than the witch-hunters of yore. No better than those in the Monty Python clip [1] linked to here and a lot less entertaining at that.
Those appratchicks are no better than Soviet appratchicks who had their own litmus tests of what was and was not acceptable. I'm not from Russia or the ex Soviet sphere but I did spend a large portion of childhood in a communist system in Eastern Europe and am still horrified that people don't seem to understand that this is exactly the kind of bullshit you had to deal with in that system.
No, you didn't get shot for dissent. No you didn't disappear. It was all much more bland and insidious than that, you were accused of a thought crime and that might kill your career. Conformity was the name of the game and I see increasing evidence that we're very much following this trajectory in North America. And it has that insidious quality too that you can't speak out against it because if you do you're clearly a racist/misogynist/homophobe/insert-bad-thing-hereist.
They are probably hoping to become a new Nomenklatura [1], a category of people ... who h[o]ld various key administrative positions in the bureaucracy, running all spheres: government, industry, agriculture, education, etc., whose positions [a]re granted only with approval by the [modern equivalent of the communist party].
The nomenklatura formed a de facto elite of public powers in the former Eastern Bloc [comparable to] the Western establishment holding or controlling both private and public powers (for example, in media, finance, trade, industry, the state and institutions).
That is what they seem to be aiming for: cushy jobs for them and ideological purity for their organisations.
DEI bureaucrats are good at defending their turf. They've internalized the Lenin's playbook: never debate your opponents on public, as that may reveal flaws in your position and undermine your authority, instead silence your opponents, ridicule them and get rid of them later, when out of public sight.
If you were a medieval knight, you wouldn't say "it's unfortunate that our opponents, occupying that castle, shout us down whenever we attempt to discuss their position." Of course they shout you down: they compete with you for authority.
The situation makes sense once you start viewing DEI as a religious orthodoxy and its enforcers as the priestly class.
Heresy and heretics are usually extirpated with extreme prejudice, at least if they threaten the interests of the establishment. Fortunately the DEI bureaucrats at the universities cannot condemn people to death, but the big question is if the Western civilization can survive if its own sources of knowledge and truth are slowly converted into a secular equivalent of Pakistani madrasas, where articles of faith are mindlessly chanted.
Theocracies tend to become very ossified and ossified academy is worse than useless.
I like your formulation of this as a "distributed measurement problem", but I'm not sure I follow. Could you elaborate? Specifically, I'm not sure if you agree or disagree with the post you are replying to. Thanks in advance.
Big money was "smart" to divert the focus away from them after Occupy Wallstreet. Roll out all the DEI initiatives, ads, etc. and by extension shame those who didn't.
And making big orgs go from being the villain to the hero.
It's more complicated than you describe. Like, these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place, they just lack focus, and are ineffective and solving the problems that they see. They see large-scale social problems of inequity, but are trying to solve it with equity-focused policy at universities, which most folks would already consider "the top."
They aren't just for show, but the optics of a well-funded diversity departments is irresistably good.
> these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place
I don't think they are, in most instances. I try never to attribute to malice, but it has been years of giving them undue, novel power. This is corruptive and they demonstrate this corruption in every case.
Any normal person would be corrupted given the same power, all of a sudden, and a mandate to use it.
To a diversity hammer everything looks like a seminar / written statement / fired for cause nail.
> Like, these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place
That makes them even worse, even more dangerous.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
Off-topic, but I found this quote hilarious specifically because it's author is C. S. Lewis since apparently he didn't realise this quote applies to the Christian God too.
Well I'm certainly not a christian but I find the quote poignant. If the man who said it had a blind-spot for his own ideology, that doesn't refute the sentiment. If anything, that reinforces his point.
Except the Christian God ostensibly does allow for people to make their own choices, rather than be micromanaged for their own good? Jehovah apparently guides with such a gentle hand there is debate about whether he even exists.
Epidemies, lightning strikes, floods, crop failures, sudden demolitions, unexpected illnesses — all that stuff has been described as "wrath of god/god's punishments" until very, very recent times. So yeah, he does allow people make their own choice but he also punishes wrong choices amply, not to mention putting people into all kinds of "trials and tribulations".
And I am not making any of that stuff up, that used to be (and "the god tries you" still is) part of generally accepted theology; C. S. Lewis definitely subscribed to "the god sends you trials" part of it which does make that quote hilariously blind-spotted.
Equity is not a social problem. Do you think African women with five children would rather work 60 hrs a week in a cubicle and have .8 kids like Korean women?
> these bureaucrat's hearts are in the right place
I disagree. While there are certainly some people with honestly good intentions in these departments, they are also lairs of Marxist-types that would gladly march others into death camps if given the chance to do so.
We cannot be naive about this. For every social justice movement with good intentions, there are evil people willing to use it as a trojan horse to carry out an awful agenda.
https://www.ams.org/journals/notices/201911/rnoti-p1778.pdf