Re:MIT abandons use of DEI statements
by AnthonyMouse on Sunday May 05, 2024 @04:53PM
(#40268247)
> DEI is a strange issue in that nearly everybody agrees that it's a good target to aim for yet any action taken to get there is discrimination.
I don't think that's true.
Suppose you find a bona fide instance of ongoing discrimination. Let's pick an egregious example. Karen, the HR manager, is an avowed white supremacist and automatically rejects all black applicants. Then you could improve DEI by removing her. Clearly not an act of discrimination.
The problem comes when Karen doesn't work for your company, instead she's the superintendent of the local school system and screws the underprivileged black kids out of the chance to go to college. Then twenty years later you're trying to hire college graduates from the local candidate pool and they're disproportionately white. You can't fix this through candidate selection because the damage is already done and any attempt to fudge your own numbers is not going to save the kids from twenty years ago who have already been screwed out of an education. Attempting to is unable to reverse its effects, all you're doing is hiring the few upper class black kids who made it because their parents had money for private school, or the ones from a different locality with no Karen and thereby no corresponding disadvantage, at the expense not of privileged upper class white kids who get in by a wide surplus, but instead the white kids from poor families at the margin. Meanwhile you're doing nothing for the poor black kids who are Karen's actual victims.
You have to root out the Karens where they are because you can't fix it years later when their statistical consequences show up somewhere else. By then the missing victims are already out of the pool.
I don't think that's true.
Suppose you find a bona fide instance of ongoing discrimination. Let's pick an egregious example. Karen, the HR manager, is an avowed white supremacist and automatically rejects all black applicants. Then you could improve DEI by removing her. Clearly not an act of discrimination.
The problem comes when Karen doesn't work for your company, instead she's the superintendent of the local school system and screws the underprivileged black kids out of the chance to go to college. Then twenty years later you're trying to hire college graduates from the local candidate pool and they're disproportionately white. You can't fix this through candidate selection because the damage is already done and any attempt to fudge your own numbers is not going to save the kids from twenty years ago who have already been screwed out of an education. Attempting to is unable to reverse its effects, all you're doing is hiring the few upper class black kids who made it because their parents had money for private school, or the ones from a different locality with no Karen and thereby no corresponding disadvantage, at the expense not of privileged upper class white kids who get in by a wide surplus, but instead the white kids from poor families at the margin. Meanwhile you're doing nothing for the poor black kids who are Karen's actual victims.
You have to root out the Karens where they are because you can't fix it years later when their statistical consequences show up somewhere else. By then the missing victims are already out of the pool.