Which more severe or intense or extensive or impactful historical inequalities are you thinking of?

You can't really measure any of them in an indisputable and quantitative way, can you? That's kind of the point!

But we all know that there are innumerable stories of families and cultures that have suffered, struggled, been exploited, been abused, and been excluded for generations or centuries in ways that they still are deeply disadvantaged for today.

Who might see more impact from more opportunity though:

* the poverty-raised first-generation-collegiate grandchild of a Russian refugee whose family history is just hundreds of years of serfdom followed immediately by Soviet oppression

* the Stanford alum son of a middle class Chinese immigrant who came here to run a thriving import/export business

They both face structured disadvantages compared to some other people, but skin color doesn't do a good job of telling you where a helping hand might contribute to the more equitable future or which will add more diversity of perspective/culture to a workplace.

Programs like DEI often assume all PoC as similarly disadvantaged, and then contrast them against an archetype of an uncommonly successful and priveleged imaginary WASP. But the reality of history and equity involves far more dimensions and many more fine distinctions.

The one that gave us the very word "slave"?

To GP's point, skin colour did not seem to be the salient factor there.

Being poor.

A rich person descendant of slaves is very clearly advantaged against a poor person descendant of slave owners. This is so evident that even those thinking that the "historical inequalities" are the important bit can't help themselves but turn to money at every step of the way to fix then.

If you meet a Chinese person can you tell if they are from a minority group that was enslaved in Vietnam as recently as the 70s, or an upper class Han family?

What’s more true is that people around the world are facing adversity of extreme severity, but due to proximity and cultural barriers we don’t hear about them.

And if you don’t care about these other forms of identity and mistreatment , then you are really saying DEI is a repayment for a particular historical wrong doing, and not an effort for greater empathy, fairness, or new ideas.

All the Fox News criticisms suddenly become relevant: which descendants were actually impacted, how much do we owe them. Let’s pay it off and stop talking about it.

I’m sure you’ll agree that’s not what we are trying to achieve.

It is not the job of DEI in the United States to address worldwide historical systemic discrimination of inequality. Globally, DEI would be concerned with this, but not specifically in the USA.

The purpose of it within the USA is to address historical systemic discrimination within the USA, which certainly go beyond merely African slaves and their descendants but do not extend to discriminatory patterns in SE Asia.

That simplifies the objectives of DEI, but it makes for scenarios that are profoundly unjust. One of my college class mates grew up in rural Vietnam, and didn't have electricity until middle school. That classmate is categorized as "Negatively Diverse" according to the company's DEI policy. Even more undesirable than whites. I, on the other hand, had a dad that went to an ivy league university and accrued an eight figure estate before his passing. My sister and I had college and private school paid for. Yet we're categorized as "diverse" taking priority over the vast majority of candidates, most of them vastly less privileged than us.

What I said above then applies.

The logical conclusion is the approach taken for native Americans, providing each tribe payments at certain ages, special programs, and scholarships.

The outcomes haven’t been great, but not due to lack of opportunity. It’s as much money and DEI programs can fix. Fixing lives requires solutions that don’t scale.