Those could be contradictory. If you're consciously categorizing people in order to "be inclusive", you are discriminating ("make an unjust or prejudicial distinction in the treatment of different categories of people or things"), and probably instituting your own mental quotas to monitor the balance.

If you just mean don't throw "Latoya's" job application in the trash just because she sounds Black and you don't want any of those, few here are going to disagree, and few here would do that either, so it's not very helpful.

seems like you're jumping through mental gymnastics to discount being more inclusive. none of that applies when you're actively going out of your way to be more inclusive of POC.

I am in no way arguing against the actual idea of including every human being, regardless of whether I think they have historically been oppressed. I'm arguing against the idea of choosing one slice of humanity that I need to "be more inclusive" to today, and the idea that that alone is practical, effective, fair advice.

"Be more inclusive" sounds like a platitude that's not very actionable. How do I know if I'm failing? Is it when I don't meet some arbitrary quota or percentage? But I thought quotas were bad. And who gets to decide what the numbers are? Do I know I'm failing when people write articles like this? By that standard I'll never succeed.

> none of that applies when you're actively going out of your way to be more inclusive of POC.

So, should I not go out of my way to "be more inclusive" of Jews or gays? In other comments, you talk about how Asians are successfully assimilated or whatever, so I guess you would prefer I "be more inclusive" more to Black people than to Asian people? Does that mean Asians are excluded from being POC? Or just that "who I need to go out of my way for" is constantly changing and entirely subjective? I feel like a racist for even googling POC to make sure I know the definition, let alone the idea of evaluating what I think someone's racial heritage is, to decide what race-based treatment they should get. ("Does she just pass as white, or is she really white? Hmm, I'd better consult Wikipedia on racial nose shapes and eye colors." This is a deliberately absurd response, but my point is that being "inclusive to POC" means being able to reliably identify POC, which is difficult and pretty much racist.)

I may have gotten a little carried away here. A simpler, less-likely-to-offend way of saying it: Making any given person feel completely at ease and welcome, is a gift that not everyone has. Telling someone without that gift to just "be more inclusive" won't magically give them that gift.

It's possible that collectively stregthening our capacities for empathy will make that gift occur more often. But again, I don't think dividing and sub-dividing each other into classes that effectively merit more or less empathy relative to each other is the way to do it.

So, one of the issues I have here is that a lot of interviewing is done without structure, and judgements are so often made based off woolly ideas like 'culture fit' which often just mean rapport.

It's actually often the interviewer who feels nervous interviewing a woman, or a person of colour... and that prevents them from forming a rapport.

With the best will in the world, if you tell someone to be meritocratic and sit them down with someone with whom they have little in common and may never meet socially they'll be less at ease and may not make a human connection and that indirectly penalises the candidate.

One thing that helps here is to have very structured interviews, as having a clear and uniform structure can help interviewers feel more at ease. There are other benefits too.