Race correlates strongly with socioeconomic background. Insofar as diversity initiatives are actually attempting to improve the lives of disadvantaged people in this country, arguments like yours amount to relative privation.
Heart disease kills more people than lung cancer, but there's nothing wrong with raising money to research lung cancer.
Yeah all he's saying is that socioeconomic background correlates even more strongly with socioeconomic background. And keeping it in economic terms has the additional plus of keeping the correlation consistent as times change.
> Yeah all he's saying is that socioeconomic background correlates even more strongly with socioeconomic background.
This is a reasonable observation, but the ought that's implicit in it is not. Heart disease correlates more strongly with death than lung cancer; does that mean it's wrong in some sense to donate to lung cancer research over heart disease?
To make my opinion more material: individuals have the right to make independent decisions within a broad moral framework. It's not wrong for individuals to personalize the good they do (in this case, in the form of racial justice) so long as what they're doing really is good.
>> Heart disease kills more people than lung cancer, but there's nothing wrong with raising money to research lung cancer.
> The difference is that face of diversity initiatives are zero sum.
No, they are not. Hiring someone from a disadvantaged group does not mean that you have to fire someone from a privileged group. That is what a zero-sum scenario would require.
Diversity initiatives level the playing field by increasing opportunities for one group relative to another. That doesn't necessarily mean that the disadvantaged group has more opportunities than the privileged group -- it only means that they have more than they did before.
No it requires not hiring the privileged group.
If you are hiring 1000 employees, and 10000 applied, and you've ranked them in some way, adding "diversity" to the equation means the ranking comes out different. Ranked potential employee 1307 using the pre-diversity standard, becomes employee 904 under the post-diversity standard.
But to move up that ranking, by definition, other people had to be moved out of the way. Maybe potential employee 1000, who only barely squeaked by, is now potential employee 1012, and so doesn't make the cut.
This is exactly what happens at universities.
Universities for example only have so many spots they can offer. So if a university keeps 10% of the spots for diversity candidates, then only 90% of the capacity is for diversity candidates.
Compounded with non diversity candidates applying in a disproportionately high number to diversity. And the population of non diverse having a better education. You end up making it harder for non diverse candidates and raising their bar.
You're right but that's fine. The argument though is that society has already imposed a 'higher bar' on "diverse candidates" (let's just be honest and call them minorities and the poor.) Think of it like this. A poor black girl named Keycia lives at home with her single mother and three siblings. She's studious but attends a bad public school, she works after school to help out at home, she takes care of her little brothers and sisters. Now compare to Chad, a white boy from an upper middle class family. He's also studious and also attends a public school but a good one with AP/IB classes, dual credit and so on. He doesn't work but he does play on one of the best lacrosse teams in the state and also swims.
All of which is to say it's two kids both working hard. Now, even with diversity initiatives, who's got a better chance of getting into Stanford? Hell who's got a better chance of getting into Iowa State? Or even being able to attend? Diversity initiatives exist to put these two kids on even ground. That's what equality of opportunity means.
Now, with diversity initiatives that are geared against Chad and in Keycia's favour, who's got a better chance of getting into Stanford?
Most diversity initiatives aren't about equal opportunities but rather equal outcomes.
Between race and socio-economic status, the later has a stronger correlation to health and so it should be used as the main indicator directing where/how to spend those healthcare dollars.
When it comes to people's health, these dollars need to be blind, or we are needlessly throwing some number of lives away each year.
Poor black people in the deep south and poor white people in the deep south still live different experiences even if they're both having a hard time. Rich african americans get treated differently from rich white people. This isn't a contest. We need to fix everything.
Isn't it though? I mean to a certain extent policy and even corporate 'diversity initiatives' are a matter of priority - first we even the ground for women, then minorities, then maybe gender id is next? I don't see the Ivy League rushing to ensure that their campus maintains wealth-diversity in the same way they ensure racial diversity. Maybe we really do need an Oppression Olympics, then we can sort out which group is most in need of help and prioritize them (I'm biased, I think it's going to be the poor.)
It's worthwhile to push your company (or university)'s race balance closer into alignment with the overall population's, and it's also worthwhile to try and strike a reasonable gender balance, in hopes that you're not locking people out of opportunities based on race or gender. It's also worthwhile to make sure there are opportunities for people from lower-income backgrounds.
The fact that some people are "losers" in this society (by modern capitalism's nature as a contest to see who can accumulate the most wealth at the expense of others) doesn't mean that diversity initiatives have to be a contest. You can run diversity initiatives with the goal of helping people who are otherwise excluded, and one of those can absolutely be aimed at helping people from low-income backgrounds.
Likewise, once someone is in the workplace, they might still need help. Maybe your standard pay scale isn't enough for a single parent with 4 kids, because he doesn't have affordable access to childcare services for his kids. Maybe one of your employees is wheelchair-bound and you could make it a lot easier for her to stay at your company if you adjusted the office floor-plan so it's easier for her to navigate.
Laws and regulations are (at least sometimes) built with this in mind, but the results will be way better if you tackle these issues directly instead of getting forced to do it by government decree.
I am neither a rich white male nor a rich black African American. Can you please elaborate on how they are treated differently?
https://www.npr.org/2015/12/29/461337958/ta-nehisi-coates-on...
https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/6967/
The gist is that being a college educated, affluent son of a doctor wasn’t enough to avoid being seen as a dangerous criminal. That simply doesn’t happen to rich white men at anything like the same rates – the average mass shooter is arrested with more care than that!
Sometimes this is national news (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Louis_Gates_arrest_contr...) but other times it’s just constant low-level stuff. As a white guy, I’ve never had a cab driver avoid picking me up; that’s very much not true for many black men even if they’re much better dressed.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/31/sport/lebron-james-racist-gra...
We saw it recently in Canada with the girl who supposedly had her hijab cut, but it ended up being a lie. Who knows why she lied, perhaps for attention, maybe her mother put her up to it.
when even rich white woman need a movement, and they do, you realize how behind schedule the US is.
Yet in 2018, most diversity initiatives still focus on race regardless of socio-economic background.