There would be merit to this line of thinking, if the diversity initiatives came in the form of anonymizing resumes and interviews (which is easier to do with remote interviews). But that's not the case. More often than not, diversity initiatives come in the form of quotas or penalties for hiring or promoting too many "non-diverse" people. And those penalties often kick in at levels of representation lower than "non-diverse" people's representation in the candidate pool. This is why I'm not irked by over-representation of Asians in tech. They're not advantaged relative to whites, if anything they're penalized for their race (at a past company asian males were categorized as "ND", Negative-Diversity even more undesirable than white males).
However, this is often not how diversity initiatives work. More often than not, they're not aimed at eliminating discrimination, they're aimed at mandating it: attaching bonuses to hires and promotions of particular races and genders, or achieving specific representation numbers (AKA quotas). This isn't eliminating discrimination, this is creating it.
Your rosy portrayal of white struggle is deeply mis-informed... People struggle because of corporate cost-cutting strategies, not because minority hires are taking jobs from white men in droves.
A lot of the posts in this thread are evoquing memories from Birth of a Nation... geesis.
This is literally not the case for the author. From the article:
>I told HR that I had considered it and I believed my recommendation was correct. HR said “OK, then we don’t need to change anything. I just wanted to check that you had considered them.”
That's literally all the author had to do. He made up the idea that it had an impact on his ability to advance in his career in his own mind.
>Again, there was no quota, but it seemed clear that promoting this person would have made HR and my corporate vice president happy.
It only "seemed clear." Weasel words. Engaging in the hyperbolic. This entire discussion is predicated on the fabrication that there is some racialized penalization system in place. It is scaremongering, nothing more than balking at the requirement to do the bare minimum.
Also, as per "Diversity Slating Guidelines" quotas are indeed being used. They require at least one Black or Latin candidate, and one female candidate. If there's only 4 people on the slate, this could mean that 50% of the pool is subject to racial or gender quotas.
There's more context behind Microsoft's diversity initiatives. Hiring managers were given bonuses for hiring diverse applicants. Or conversely, they were penalized for hiring non-diverse applications: https://qz.com/1598345/microsoft-staff-are-openly-questionin...
The highest performing team I have been on had people from 4 continents, ran the gamut on political views, had disparate education levels (from literally a high school dropout to PhDs from prestigious schools), and had people of many races. It had no women and no black people. By the standards of HR, it was not a diverse team at all.
The DEI folks I have worked with want a very specific kind of diversity: They want you to hire people of all genders and colors, but only rich ones from a few schools. They think that school reputation and awards are a better measure of aptitude than an interview or a take-home test (claiming that the test or interviewer is biased).
Only the diversity may go along the lines that the contemporary DEI philosophy does not like or even accept.
E.g. a Ukrainian refugee, a kid of poor Korean shopkeepers, an ex-Muslim atheist who does not even want to pretend that he is still Muslim.
If this is true, then I guess affirmative action isn't needed, right?
"Whiteness" was created in a Virginia 1691 law to be "not negroe and not indian". Naturally, that also expanded to be not: Jews, Asians, sometimes not Italians, usually not Irish, and absolutely no indigenous people of any sort.
Defining yourself by what peoples you exclude is the core kernel of racism. And that's what "white" means.