Because the USA is built on structural racism. You still track how people vote based on race, you allow the authorities to record race in databases and in some cases you have to fill in your race on official document.

Non-whites are being kept down by a ruling class. In some cases it it on purpose (gerrymandering of voting districts based on skin color - a GOP favorite) and in some cases it's because of hidden biases (recruiters favoring people of their own skin color and background without thinking about it).

This, believe it or not, happens at the university level too by the people who are processing admissions.

It's not a white thing, every race does it, but in the USA most companies, governments and schools are run by a white people.

"I would never do that!" I can hear you say. But you probably would favor someone of your own background when looking to hire someone.

Go to a a random European country where Asians and people with African background are the minorities and you'll see Asian men with Asian women, and black men with black women and guess what, they too have an racist bias that they (most likely) are not aware of.

DEI is meant to be a counter to this.

I often see the "complaint" (hard to find the right word here - it's discussed in somewhat coded/conspiratorial language for fear of sounding racist I'm sure) that when Indians are hired into a company, they'll then begin hiring more and more Indians. As you say, this is actually a rather natural human tendency and I doubt it's limited to Indians. Of course, many people here will also note that they get most of their jobs through their network (side note; it must be nice speaking as an introvert who just has to apply to jobs like a regular schlub). Well, if you're Indian, especially from India, I bet your network is going to be fairly Indian.

> DEI is meant to be a counter to this.

If DEI was about removing barriers due to racial (both conscious and unconscious) biases, then it wouldn't be so controversial. For example, symphonies auditioning candidates behind a screen so they hiring people are only presented with the sound of their playing. But DEI is the opposite of that. It's about very explicitly identifying race/gender/etc up front and then using that as the primary basis for hiring decisions. Disqualifying someone because of their race is not only allowed but required by DEI policies.

How did we end up with it ending up as "no more white males", white people excluded from events and buildings, people talking about how they like their white free orgs in publicly traded companies, companies with no white people in a white majority city described as diverse, someone posting on HN with a full sense of righteousness about the Google Gemini racism scandal that he'd consider a request for a photo containing only white people to an LLM suspect but one of any other ethnicity perfectly fine.

From me I'd like to ask where all the people from the Indian sub continent are in the Gemini Photos given they make a large percentage of developers at Google but are non existent in the output. Why the literal erasure of ~2 billion people?

Supposedly it's decades long work by the Chinese Communist Party that started in the 1960s and led up to where we are now. I wonder if the Soviet Union was also involved?

Here's an article, from what appears to be a reliable source: https://www.hoover.org/research/beijings-woke-propaganda-war...

"The effects of this brainwashing are shown in the American Left’s adoption of the CCP’s key concepts and nomenclature."

"Today’s common use of the word “progressive” by the radical Left traces its intellectual origin straight to the Marxist-Leninist “dialectical” categorization of people into reactionaries and progressives. It is not from the modern legacy of the American Progressive Movement represented by William Jennings Bryan, Theodore Roosevelt, Robert M. La Follette, and Henry A. Wallace."

"The primary method of Mao’s brainwashing in Yenan was “consciousness raising,” which has become since the 1960s the main strategy of the American Left, especially the radical American feminist movement."

"This was the first time I heard that phrase, which, over the years, moved out of China and on to the streets and fashions of America in the 1960s."

By the way I'm getting a lot of upvotes, and downvotes too for this post. So it's a mixed reaction from the readers of this site.

Certain people, discovered how easy it is, to change entire institutions, by applying targeted pressure towards individual managers of those institutions.

No manager dares to refuse these initiatives because they'll be instantly named by the activist, with the help of journalist friends, and ensure they lose their job.

Hence by going one at a time, a small group of activists can change far larger organisations.

Of course, every action has a reaction. Enough resentment has built up, that made anti-woke a legitimate position to take in the public eye, with no longer much risk of losing the job. This makes all the previous tactics lose their power.

Also, the 'anti-woke' crowd is learning these tactics too. From congressional grilling of university presidents, to gamers explicitly documenting the DEI consultancy involvements, its all targeting and absolutely destroying individuals to cause a chilling effect on the populace at large.

> No manager dares to refuse these initiatives because they'll be instantly named by the activist, with the help of journalist friends, and ensure they lose their job.

Doesn't this feel very authoritarian ? Just replace manager with citizen and you have USSR.

Authoritarianism would be if it was top down.

This is more a leftist version of McCarthyism. Aka intellectual purity testing and purges.

I don't know why you're getting down voted for this. It's a very precise description of what has been happening the last decade. Conform and declare your support or be ruined, even if you have valid criticisms and disagreements with the doctrine.

I would assume it’s precisely because it’s a precise and accurate description. Given the current climate.

> Authoritarianism would be if it was top down.

If a minority can impose their will into institutions, destroying the life of anybody that opposes them, you need a quite messed-up conception of power structures to place that minority "down".

When said minority are just as likely to be peers or subordinates within the power structure, I don’t see how it could be ‘from the top’. Do you?

Because you can't put the power to influence behavior on a straight line.

Each clique has it's own power structure.

Charisma, rule of law, pity, revenge, resentment, morality, resources, it's all a part of it.

Do you think every participant to Mao’s cultural revolution was consenting?

No. People do whatever they can throughout history, and end up having to participate to larger changes. The only remedy we’ve found was Humanism, l’esprit critique, education for everyone, and raising awareness and allergy to all authoritarian acts, but see, in the last 50 years, I’ve seen younger people who aren’t even aware who Diderot is, let alone had enough literacy to read or write those books fluently if they spent the time, even in $130k jobs. Then we flooded each country with about 12% people who haven’t had those Humanism tenants taughts at school.

I’ll from using a stronger metaphor because it will sound cheesy, but by losing the teachings of logic, rhetoric and history, our civilization is not able to hold the pillars of democracy anymore.

I’ve been here. “We can’t hire any more white men” is probably an illegal stance, but what do I gain from fighting that? Nothing, and I suspect I’d be fired.

I’m a tadpole in a huge lake. I have no influence over these likely illegal hiring decisions. And unless I’m just incredibly unlucky, these same conversations are happening everywhere at big companies.

Cause few are brave enough to stick their neck out and stand up to it. Those who do are called nasty names and are forced to withstand a ideological purity trial that carries some potential of being fired.

There is a lot risk for a minor reward, especially if you don't actually care about the institution you are defending.

American society is a bit messed up going back to slavery (and maybe the treatment of the indigenous people). That part (America of all countries) is not a surprise. It's also not new, random e.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_correctness

Maybe this also has to do with the general idea that it's not up to a government to do things, it's up to individuals, which to me is how Americans think. I would think that dealing with inequalities in society, ensuring everyone has equal opportunity and has their basic needs provided for (health, education etc.) would be the function of a government. If the government isn't addressing that then you have a vacuum. To me it's obvious that e.g. hiring policies or university acceptance criteria are not the right place to fix society but rather issues should be addressed upstream from those. By the government. But having government do things seem to be something Americans dislike.

Just as a side point, approx 3-4% of slaves ended up in North America. Most went to the Carribbean and South America (Brazil mainly). Nobody ever seems to want to talk about those countries though for some reason. Nor do they seem particularly interested in the slave trade that exists now in many countries in one form or another. My guess is its because these other examples are not politically useful.

>Just as a side point, approx 3-4% of slaves ended up in North America. Most went to the Carribbean and South America (Brazil mainly). Nobody ever seems to want to talk about those countries though for some reason.

The average SJW/Redditor/DEI advocate sincerely believes that slavery has existed in only one country in the world's history: In the United States, involving Africans. The etymology of the word "slav"? Brazil? Haiti? Guadeloupe? North Africans enslaving Europeans? Vikings taking thralls? Feudalism? Never heard of 'em.

Here in Brazil, we care, and we try to make amends: there are quotas for black people in universities, and our law is rigorous against manifestation of racism in social media, or in real life. I think it is expected that any place that enslaved people make their amends for their past crimes. But I fail to understand how for American people this should mean talking about slavery in Brazil instead of in their own country.

America is the most likely country for this to happen to, due to the unresolved issues surrounding slavery and the abandonment of reconstruction after the civil war. This is compounded when viewed through the USAs founding mythology.

Other countries have done worse, but they haven't done so as hypocritically as the United States.

>unresolved issues surrounding slavery

>country was founded 248 years ago

>the "issue" stopped happening 159 years ago

I don't think an issue that lasted for barely 1/3 of our country's history and hasn't been legal for the entirety of this century, last century, or much of the century before that is the problem. I think people's addiction to being full-time victims is the issue, because if you're always a victim, you never have to be responsbile for anything in your life, you can always blame your imagined "oppressor". People do this, teach their children that they are also victims regardless of their actions, and maintain a long line of familial victimhood. DEI is a direct symptom of that.

You were the last western country to deal with slavery, and it took a civil war to force the issue.

Then reconstruction was ended due to a political backlash from the south.

Don't pretend this is all over.

It was too outrageous to be believed until it was too late.

Remember the term "SJW" (social justice warrior) from around a decade ago? That was wokeism and DEI before it got its current branding. The people who saw this coming were dismissed as crazy.