So it should come as no shock whatsoever that now that another political group is politically ascendant the marketing that is valuable has changed, so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure.
Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. Progressives have forgotten in the last 10-15 years that the progress which we've won took generations not because our predecessors were weak and slow but because it inherently takes generations to effect lasting change. It's a slow, painful process, and if you think you accomplished it in a decade you're almost certainly wrong.
According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal.
My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. We take for granted perhaps the first black president is _recent_, the first time having two black senators is now, school integration is about 40 years old in some places - not even one lifetime.i don't think it's an accurate characterization that huge strides were made in just the last decade, or that we were even starting at a "good" place.
I fundamentally agree on how slow the progress has been. I don't know if it needs to be that slow. I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. Notably because of how little has been done. It's not like we're in that good of a place, never really were.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/meta-ending-...
There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them.
Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
Definitely agree nobody will vote for anything that costs them anything.
But my kids are mixed race partial African heritage and I do think it behooves us as Americans to think about rectifying that terrible wrong on my wife's side of the family. There are dozens of examples of horribly wrong headed ways to do that (Brazil had some really creative and disastrous ideas), but we should at least acknowledge the lingering effects that still impacts people today that are descendants of slaves.
Maybe I'm just sensitive because it feels like Florida, where I currently live, is trying to wipe away that history. Why inhibit discussion about it?
What’s the rationale for distinguishing between these house valuations by attaching moral metadata to them? Everyone’s economic condition is path dependent. What’s the point of distinguishing between similar economic conditions based on that path?
The typical reason people focus on these economic effects is that Americans broadly agree that people don’t bear direct moral culpability for their family’s conduct or their ancestor’s conduct. So the focus shifts to persistent economic effects. But that just attaches that generational moral culpability to economic valuations. My wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother was a waitress in rural Oregon. Why is that different than if your wife’s inheritance isn’t worth anything because her grandmother couldn’t get a bank loan? The economic conditions are identical, and the people with moral culpability are dead.
The important context is that there’s more people situated like my wife than your wife. Although e.g. 62% of black people made under $40,000 in 2016, and only 40% of white people, there’s still four times as many white people under that threshold than black people. What’s the logic of singling out a minority of people who are similarly situated economically and treating their economic circumstances specially because of what happened to their ancestors?
My take on your statement is similar to "If the economics of your area is not good, they can just move." Most areas where the economy is falling a person is incapable of selling their home since no one wants to buy their house. This leads to a stale mate of having to stay in the area because they cannot afford to move and doing so would just compound their poverty. Children are often the ones that leave because they are most likely have a near zero dept are more time to build up their economic mobility.
Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
The solutions between the two are the same. Social acceptance and assistance to provide economic mobility. Irony, is that these environments reduce social engagement producing tribalism like states where trust is lost between these groups. This is our problem and we need to stop thinking independently because this just leads to selfish behavior that harms our society.
Creating a better environment for others is a Win-Win versus creating a better environment just for you is Win-Lose or Lose-Lose resolution.
[0] https://publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highli...
They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution. Go look at the actual maps https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/ and see for yourself. Typically, the redlined neighborhoods are conveniently located close to downtown.
> Rural houses where a more sound investment when 40% of the USA employment was agricultural. As the this industry became more automated, the value shifted with employment opportunities. These changes can also be seen in towns and cities built around manufacturing today.
In the context of redlining, observe that agricultural employment was already at around 20% when redlining started, and 5% when it ended, and also the redlined neighborhood were the ones with best commutes and job availability. This is still true, by the way: the ghetto parts of the American cities almost universally are centrally located, close to jobs and facilities, and they are well served by transportation infrastructure (in fact, this is one of the activists biggest complaints: that they're too close to freeways).
> They were not often near oil refineries, or other sources of industrial polution. At best, you could argue that they were more often closer to it than the districts marked as "best" or "still desirable", but in all, very few of redline neighborhoods were close to industrial pollution.
The study found:
> Across all included cities, redlined D-graded neighborhoods had 12.2 ± 27.2 wells km−2, nearly twice the density in neighborhoods graded A (6.8 ± 8.9 wells km−2).
So, just like I said, "more often", but that's still only less than twice as often as the most desirable neighborhoods. This is hardly a noticeable difference to residents.
Significance:
Our study adds to the evidence that structural racism in federal policy is associated with the disproportionate siting of oil and gas wells in marginalized neighborhoods.
Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts. "The presence of wells in historically redlined neighborhoods remains relevant, as many of these redlined neighborhoods have persistent social inequities and the presence of wells, both active and post-production, can contribute to ongoing pollution."
* Meant to say,"Redline districts are often near oil refiners and highly polluted."
Yes, 2x is clearly "disproportionate", but it's a far cry from being obviously significant. If you assume that pollution is not significant in best neighborhoods, then it's not greatly significant in worst, because twice something insignificant is still hardly significant. Replace oil wells with something else that's clearly harmful: murders. Imagine the worst neighborhoods had twice as many murders as the best ones. This would actually be improvement over the status quo: worst neighborhoods are far more dangerous than just 2x!
> Even the last paragraph highlights the fact the pollution is a high factory in these districts.
It does no such thing. It says that wells can contribute to ongoing pollution. That does not mean that it does, and it does not even quantify the contribution of wells to pollution, nor does it even show that the worst districts are significantly more polluted in the first place.
The point of this study is to corroborate the narrative of redlined district being significantly more polluted than the "best" districts, and that this is why residents of these districts and their descendants have worse outcomes today. It shows something that's not very interesting on its own (just twice the number of oil wells). However, it's clearly successful in building narrative, given that it convinced you that it provides evidence for it.
The way it’s often taught today is different. It’s teaching about the history as a way to justify or support calls for differential or remedial treatment in the present. And that has the opposite effect—it reinforces that we’re different, rather than being the same.
This is where Americans should wake up and learn some lessons from the rest of the world. Encouraging people to develop ethnocultural identity is something that has never worked anywhere in the history of the world. The idea that we’ll teach kids to see each other as different, but then assume those differences are all “good, actually” is a fantasy. The only way multi-ethnic societies have ever worked is to suppress identity.
For example, “Han Chinese” would probably be several different ethnic groups if people were being honest. Likewise, “white people” are also several different ethnic groups—you can see the difference between French and German people in their DNA. They’re no more the same than are Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. What has suppressed ethnic strife in America between “white people” is the homogenization of the population and subordination of ethnic identities to a constructed, synthetic identity.
Funny anecdote: I live in a blue state, so they’re trying to teach my daughter about “BIPOC.” She’s the only Bangladeshi in the class, so her teacher gave her a book about a Pakistani girl, thinking she’d be able to relate. And I’m like “you’re not Pakistani. Pakistanis tried to genocide your poppy and grandma in 1971.”
One thing that you definitely can't trace in the DNA is "that group of people tried to genocide my grandparents", but that seems like an important "ethnic group" distinction to you.
This is not to dispute your main point which I take to be that you stop fighting over "ethnic" distinctions by giving people a new unifying identity, but I still find myself thinking that something is lost in the process, even if it is a proven approach.
Racism is everywhere, and often far more dramatic and in your face than what you are describing. What you are describing is still wrong! And was made illegal for a reason. But anyone coming from Asia, Africa, South America, and most of Europe is going to just shrug their shoulders at what you just described.
I have yet to see even the most progressive Western European country that didn’t have a huge hate against Roma/Travelers, or Indian community that didn’t have some serious Muslim/Hindu friction, or Chinese vs Non-Chinese, etc. And let’s not talk about Eastern Europe, or African tribal/clan warfare!
The issue here is that the more you talk about all the wrongs and specifics, the more you highlight finer granularities of identity, the more you base things on some small group, the more it splits everyone, the more different groups/factions end up getting created, the more finger pointing happens, etc.
The more people start thinking of us vs them, their identity and how they are different/split from everyone else, etc. and past grievances, the more they start thinking about retribution, control/exclusion, etc.
For an incredibly evolved version of this, check out a (brief summary of [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caste_system_in_India].
It ends up in a nearly infinitely Balkanized hellscape where the more someone knows about someone else, the more likely they will end up enemies than friends. And eventually, nearly everyone is an enemy with their neighbors, and sometimes even themselves.
If we try to focus on what should happen, and the best common identity we can, and punish divergences from that instead, at least we can be mostly going in that, someone similar direction. And have at least some idea what common elements we can be friends on, and what we shouldn’t talk about lest we become (likely) enemies.
It is far from perfect, but at least it has some cohesive identity and direction, rather than infinite levels of infighting. Nothing is perfect.
Together, we can be strong. Alone, we are weak and easy to pick off.
The issue the US always has had, is that really the only common theme between all its different groups, is the desire to make money, and be left alone to do what they want.
But then when times get tough, inevitably some groups want to make everyone else do what they want and/or take everyone else’s money.
You don't even have to go this deep. Each and every friend of mine who's German of mixed heritage (Black, Asian) has struggled with people who can't imagine a German not being white. As in you, a German born in Germany, get addressed in English every now and then by strangers, because if you're not white, you have to be a tourist.
It’s like “Bangladesh.” Literally, “country of the Bengalis.” If you aren’t brown with vaguely southeast Asian features then you’ll always be considered a foreigner. That’s not “racism.” That’s the nature of nations that arise from being the homeland of specific ethnolinguistic groups.
Ethnocultural groups like germans and Bangladeshis have ancient shared history, language, and culture. When you say that people should assume that anyone who looks any way should be assumed to be German, that erases Germans as a distinct ethnocultural group. It’s completely different than saying the same thing in a country like America.
My family has been in Bangladesh since before anyone can remember, likely back before the language split from vernacular Sanskrit. My parent’s generation fought the Pakistanis to establish the country as a homeland. You cannot, out of a desire to avoid offending a small minority, erase that shared history and reduce being Bangladeshi (or German or Japanese) to a legal designation established with some paperwork.
Not sure why you find that surprising. Being German is not written on your face. Since most Germans are white, most people will make the correct assumption that if someone is not white, there is a stronger likelihood that they are not German. The same happens in Japan with mixed race kids who get treated like foreigners even though they were born and spent their whole life in Japan. That's just how brains work.
If you had no prior assumption you could assume that nobody is who they seem to be and that would make things very complicated for everyday life.
A bit of an aside but I find it very condescending by fellow Germans to address people immediately in English if they don’t speak perfect fluent German - give the people some chance to learn and practice the language for god sakes
I'm white and spend a lot of time in Korea. I can get around in Korean. Do I take offence when a Korean talks to me in English first? No, it wouldn't make sense. If they switch to English when they notice that my Korean is imperfect? Neither. I'd have unrealistic expectations about my fellow humans if I blamed people for easily explainable interactions. Better to presume good intentions than to take offence at the banality of such interactions.
I’m not saying you should take offence - I just know that it can be corrosive for people in that position. Being never seen as part of the culture does something to you, you feel apart, forever, even across generations.
I’m saying to give your fellow humans more consideration when you interact with them.
It might not affect you much because you didn’t build your whole life in Korea.
But imagine you are 3rd generation living there, your parents have been born in Korea but you still aren’t seen as part of the country. It builds resentment and segregates the citizens which makes life harder for everyone.
If 9 times out of 10 English is actually the correct choice, then it probably makes less sense to do this.
There is something to be said of for the individual cultures being even stronger during those times. Perhaps the formation of the German nation state was a counter reaction to the Napoleonic wars?
Anyway, this has little to do with immigration from all over the world: All these kingdoms already had the same language and largely the same culture.
Have states such as France ethnically cleansed other peoples from within their borders? If so, then why isn't that mentioned in the well-known histories?
In fact, in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finns. Sami minority got discriminated admittedly, but not violently persecuted.
https://www.euronews.com/2023/06/08/how-did-sweden-sterilise...
https://nordics.info/show/artikel/eugenics-in-the-nordic-cou...
Literally the Vikings [1].
> in Finland the largest ethnic minority (Swedish) on average do much better than ethnic Finn
Yes [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_Norwa...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish%E2%80%93Novgorodian_...
As you say addressing non-white people in English does not happen very often. Why would it? There are so many immigrants that 30% of interactions in department stores supermarkets etc. are with non-white people.
When you are stopped by a security guard in a store, he is invariably of Arab origin.
Why? Are we talking population or space? On population, 1900 US population was 75M, current Germany population is 85M.
If we are talking space - what does that have to do with it? And even in 1900, Americans were far more clustered in cities in the Northeast/Cali/etc, so probably not terrifically more area than current footprint of Germany.
Currently we are seeing countries in Europe go through a moral panic over immigration that is probably not terribly different than the US in 1900. I've seen some historical stats that something like 80% of US urban residents in 1900 were foreign born or 1st generation. NYC alone we've had immigrants as ~35-40% of our population from 1900 thru the tightening of immigration laws in 1920s, after which it dropped to 18% by 1970. The percent has rebounded since then and is back around 35-40% again.
So nothing that is going on in Europe is terribly different or unique, and not being a melting pot is a choice that most of Europe has made by being ethnostates.
Japan didn’t just end up with 97-99% Japanese population by accident.
Their globalist friends want more immigration to drive down wages and increase rents.
This is nothing at all like in the U.S. The U.S. is huge and I'm green with envy when I see YouTubers owning whole estates in Idaho to make their private aircraft videos. Such things are completely impossible in Germany.
Then there is the cultural aspect of course. The U.S. has been an immigration country from the start. Europe had diverse hand highly advanced cultures in music, paintings, literature etc. Frankly, since the Americanization following WW2 neither Europe nor the U.S. have produced anything comparable.
What you call ethnostate, which is a derogatory term, other people call culture.
I don’t think America has been a melting pot from the start. It was Protestant whites and slaves for 100 years or more.
Letting in Catholics and Jews was a choice and controversial at the time. Then the same for East Asians, South Asians, MENAs, and the latest drama is Latinos. I probably forgot many other groups. Different choices could have been made at each juncture. Continuing on this trend was a choice.
Germany continuing to not be a melting pot is a choice just the same as deciding to become one.
European wages are a different issue and it is to me more a problem of thinking you can tax and regulate your way to prosperity. Letting in more or less immigrants isn’t the primary problem.
Why do Americans and foreigners want to start companies in the US so much? Where are the European startups? Are any Americans moving overseas to start companies? No new firm formation leads to no new job creation leads to lagging economic growth.
If you want to see some European racists, go to a soccer/football match between national teams. Or ask a Northern European what they REALLY think about the south. Or even a Northern Italian about Southern Italians. Or ask almost any of them about Eastern Europe or especially Roma.
In many cases immigrants bring their own racism to the US that white Americans are completely unaware of. One of the only direct "racism in the workplace" complaints I've been party to in the workplace was Indian on Indian. Former team lead was fired and replacement was an Indian guy, from one particular caste/region I don't recall. Anyway he immediately tried to due-diligence the caste/region of the only Indian on the team. The rest of us had no idea what was going on until our Indian colleague rapidly found another job and accused him on the way out the door.
I've even seen some crazy resentment in the workplace between patriotic CCP PRC enjoyers vs Taiwanese coworkers "you aren't Taiwanese, it's not a real country".
It's not to excuse any past or present faults in the US, but only to raise the relative performance to other countries&group / how achievable the utopian Star Trek vision is. Our technology and living conditions have evolved rapidly, but HumanOS remains the same. We move ever forward, but its slow.
One issue that often escapes our attention when we focus on group identities and historical grievances is just how much we collaborate across groups. When a white woman (Katalin Karikó, Hungarian) worked on mRNA, the end results of that research were used by all groups and social identities. We collaborate across much more than we like to acknowledge.
But, I fail to see how your lengthy diatribe about modern day racism, most of what I agree with, disputes my comment about reparations. Those are totally different things and that's what I'm pointing out.
After all, there are practical problems of who is eligible, how long, and who gets to decide that.
Not only that, but at that point there is now strong financial incentives to be in specific groups. At least while the money flows.
Not everyone can be eligible, or it loses all meaning. Someone has to pay, or it can’t be funded.
Someone has to be officially the victim, and officially the offender, or such a program can’t actually exist. Etc.
These aren’t modern problems either, and this isn’t ‘modern’ racism, whatever that is. [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_Alcatraz]
If you are a white or Asian boy who likes computers, and have been playing with code ever since you were little, you get rejected at college admission with a higher score than a black kid. Why has anything to do with skin color, programming doesn't get any easier if you are white. Math problems are just as hard no matter how rich are your parents. If you achieve some level of understanding, it should not be wiped away by skin color, especially to redress a wrong that was made generations ago and not your fault.
Tying it back together, though, this is why I'm disappointed that there is so much backlash about DEI programs. I know first hand from my time at a Fortune 50 company that the lack of black people employed there was partially due to the fact that they had never recruited at any historical black college ever. When they hired a Chief Diversity Officer, we did (I went there). And there were good candidates.
I successfully recommended for hire the first black employee at the satellite office for that company. That (candidates being pushed that don't look like the current workforce) just simply doesn't happen when it is all white guys. We generally find other people that look like we do to recommend and hire, especially when we aren't aware of it. I'm sure Asian men suffer from the same myopia as I do. It doesn't stop unless I really think about my default behaviors.
That feels like the right way to do reparations. That's the best way, IMHO, to build generational wealth.
But, it's falling apart because angry white men like me are complaining that they are cut out of opportunities. I can understand, as a 51 year old white male I've seen how hard it is to find work the last few years. It's brutal. But I've always gotten most of my jobs through my personal network of other mostly white men that worked in tech. If you don't have that network because you aren't in a group heavily represented in tech, then your chances are slim even if it truly is a meritocracy.
At some point (when growth is not infinite), there are a limited number of positions after all.
Or did everyone evaluate the candidate without awareness of their color, and come to the decision?
Same as someone who was black, but otherwise qualified, would have if someone discriminated against them, yes? Like the folks who never got considered because they went to the wrong college. (Though notably, you apparently did get hired despite going to that college correct?)
Why shouldn’t those ‘angry white dudes’ be angry? Really?
Anymore than a black dude be angry when the same happens to him?
Because they ‘already had enough’? When should they stop being angry then? When they no longer have enough? Who decides that? And why should they let someone decide that for them?
I’m not saying either choice is good - I’m saying this is why making those choices this way fundamentally causes the problems it does.
But I’m also under no illusions that will change anytime soon.
The strong do what they will while they are strong, and it’s a fool that lets someone make them weak enough they are no longer strong eh?
And the weak will do what they can to be strong, and it’s a fool who lets themselves get talked out of that too.
The difference is if ‘us’ means people with a common nation, or a common color, or gender, or sex, or religion.
In your personal situation, how long would it take of not actually having opportunities before you’re willing to get angry enough to do something? Or lost potential income due to better opportunities you could have had, but didn’t.
Some people are less patient, and more violent than you likely are. And apparently, they just won the elections.
Frankly, they often do.
I hope we can build some common identity as “world citizens” or whatever- but the trend seems to go towards _more_ balkanisation and more division along class/wealth/privilege.
The ‘black community’, ‘Irish community’, ‘catholic community’. And those do often work - frankly, it’s often the only thing that works when that community does have some specific interest.
It’s for lobbying and other pressure tactics, yes?
Civil rights is a specific example of a universal interest: equality before the law. The rise of the Nazi party is an example of people forsaking their own interests for a facade of collective interest that covered over the personal interest of a few leaders - Nazi Germany was extraordinarily corrupt, and of course ruined the lives of and killed most of the people who it claimed to exist for the interest of.
It is interesting that you bring up "Catholic interests," because the Church is naturally opposed to concepts like "Irish interests." The Church doesn't want its members to divide themselves along ethnic or other lines because that would detract from their Catholicism. It is no accident that the Nazis - the most famous example of an "ethnic interest group" - had to destroy or subsume every other kind of organization to exist.
If you were an Irish immigrant in NYC in the 30’s, would you still say that about an Irish community group?
How about a Latino workers group in 70’s Los Angeles?
Or for that matter a ‘black community’ group in 70’s Los Angeles too.
> Humans are tribal. [...], I don’t think just pretending we’re all one [tribe] will work. [...] I hope we can build [a] common [tribe].
You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on.
DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity). But to the dominant group, this feels like oppression, in the same way that feminism feels like man-hatred to many men bc if you have 90% of the pie and there's a trend toward you only having 50% of the pie, you think that's oppression.
So I get why you view this as a punishment of your group (which I assume is one of those white groups who "didn't own slaves", never mind that they all benefited from, and still do, the systemic oppression of non-white people in the US).
I'm full German American to the extent I'm still the same religion as my ancestors, I still speak German in the home with my kids, etc. But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
I guess that what went wrong with them. Rather than generate systems to treat _evereyone_ equally the systems attempted very hard to 1. categorize people into predefined groups 2. after people are grouped, then treat each group individually.
What I mean that rather than have a quota for recruitment, recruitment systems should have been converted totally blind to age, gender and visible phenotype differences. THIS would have leveled the playing field.
The DEI systems that were implemented were just policy theater, that were ineffective and alienating.
In US corps outside US (I worked for a subsidiary in Finland) the DEI stuff they implemented was just insane and non-helpfull almost in every aspect. "You can no longer use git repositories with the term master.." - that was hilarious. It's obvious nobody was serious about DEI. Management just hired bunch of consultants who sold them checklists so managament could check the box in their own checklist. An opportunity to actually help minorities was lost sadly.
The only good thing that came from the rigmarole were unisex toilets which are just common sense.
Interviewing for orchestras behind a screen, so the judges can't see the age/gender/race. That's a good way to go about equality.
I think you are correct, but it still misses the mark on framing. White people are indeed not punished, but they are being hindered by DEI mandates. At one point, it gets a little annoying, because we see no real benefit from it. If anything, demands seemed to escalate.
I will tell you my own personal 'fuck it' moment. Company meeting with chief diversity guy. Peak DEI moment. A suggestion is made after presentation that maybe 'we' should have 'black safe spaces', where only black people meet. It took everything in my power to remain silent at that time, because if I have ever heard of a racist policy, that was it and the company is lucky I did not pursue legal path. Someone else did cautiously raised it though and that concerned was dismissed with wordplay.
I am just one guy, but DEI breeds heavy, misunderstood and very much unseen resentment discussed in small local groups only, because you cannot even discuss it openly in company channels. If anything, people bond over 'fuck it' moment.
<< But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
shrug Does it mean we should exacerbate those issues by instituting restitution? Seems counterproductive.
When the required score to hire a member of group A is 95, and the required score to hire a member of group B is 90, then clearly group A is being punished.
When more resources are spent recruiting members of group A than group B, then clearly group B is being punished.
When time is never spent praising members of group A just for being members of group A, but time is spent praising members of group B just for being members of group B, then group A is being punished.
That's what DEI solves for. Not "higher a lesser candidate," but "when both candidates are equal, use diversity of the company when making the final decision"
If you don’t get enough candidates, or the candidates you do get don’t happen to exactly align quality wise on whatever other criteria you are using, of the right race, gender, etc. what do you think actually happens?
NOTE: I have been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that what happens is not what you assert. I have also been told multiple times by HR reps and recruiters that I should say what you are asserting if anyone asks.
You can't just dismiss the framing to dismiss the injustice it points to. Slavery wasn't meant to be a punishment either, doesn't mean we can omit the injustice it entails.
Skip explicit racial discrimination and help those who are most in need. It's that simple. Yes this group will have a specific racial makeup but it makes a world of difference to discriminate based on need rather than taking a racist approach.
Did you sleepwalk through literally every American history class you had growing up?
It boggles the mind that you can write "discrimination against people doesn't help the people who aren't discriminated against."
That is the point of discrimination: to benefit those who aren't discriminated against. That's why it was created, that's why it persists, and that's why people who benefit from the discrimination oppose its cessation. Look elsewhere in this discussion: the people who historically benefit from that oppression are saying its abatement is oppression directed back at themselves.
The harm is often second factor such as the abundance of cheap (or free) labor yields less bargaining power and you end up working for less than you otherwise would have (but also the psychological harm of living in an unfair society). But next to the harm caused to those who are indeed discriminated against, the harm is rather minute.
- Household income disparities between groups, without controlling for household makeup. There are vast differences between racial groups in regard to one vs. two parent households (+/-30% between white/black). It should not be controversial, that two income earners, create larger household incomes (or reduce need for expensive childcare).
- Income disparities, without controlling for age or time in workforce. White populations in US average about 14yrs older than non-white. It should not be controversial, that people tend to make more money the longer they have been in the workforce (via raises, promotions, etc).
- 74 cents on the dollar between sexes. Hopefully this one doesn't need an explanation in 2025.
- Achievement gaps. High achievers throw these numbers off (vs. US average), hence, the killing of many advanced placement programs. The other one I see where I live, is more ironic than bad data--people bemoan the growth of the achievement gap yet don't see the connection to the consistent yearly refuge resettlements of thousands of ESL Somalis in the same schools.
Many of these missteps are so blatant, I can't take anyone using them seriously and throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I mention this only to support the point you make above, not to virtue signal. Anyway, it's nothing my family did, it's just historical circumstance. But to my family, the insane amount of politics and drama around DEI and BLM in America still seems foreign to us, even a few generations later.
I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.
MLK had one famous line in a speech that has been leveraged by reactionaries to use him as a weapon against advocates of racial liberation. But that is not an honest use of his beliefs.
The whole movement for racial equality, and thus liberation, in the USA grew from intensely Christian foundations. One of the core tenets of abolitionism was the idea that humans are created equal, and such attributes as race or skin color are irrelevant before God, and hence to the faithful, too. Christ specifically said that being a Greek or being a Jew does not matter before God, and being a slave or being a master also does not matter; all are equal.
So, certain amounts of colorblindness are inherent to the very idea of people of different origins being equal, as it emerged in the USA, and supposedly elsewhere in the Christian-dominated areas of the world.
Also, it's the idea of equality, equal worth (before God), not of fairness or compensation; the latter might come from atonement and Christian love to the neighbor.
Eventually other ideas took hold and somehow eclipsed the initial ideas, not just of 1860s but also of MLK's.
Calling MLK's values "colorblindness" in the way of "racial liberation" is the kind of double-speak the GP criticizes. Language that distances everyone from the capital-T Truth that MLK knew and died for, in favor of small truths that pretend to unite but actually divide.
It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today.
It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.
In other words, equity and equal outcomes are not a goal, they're a heuristic. Same as how logical fallacies, while wrong, are still valuable heuristics.
My read on the past decade is that most DEI programs were adopted in blue[0] spaces primarily to redirect Progressive voices away from questions of economic justice and elite control. That is, businesses virtue-signal the most tolerable Progressive politics in order to distract rank-and-file Democratic voters away from questions like "isn't it fucked up that Mexico is basically a perma-scab to bust unions with" or "why are we just letting Facebook buy up all the social media".
To be clear, you're right that these companies want to engineer society from the top down. But it's not about handing out high-paying jobs to the unqualified for the lulz, it's about making Facebook into the new Boeing - a company that is so integral to the operation of the state that shipping software that murders people is considered an excusable mistake. If that means Facebook has to change political alliances every so often, then so be it.
[0] As in, "aligned with the Democratic Party leadership", not "left-wing"
He was not the harmony flowers and rainbows he was white washed into.
Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.
That's simply not true. You can also be persistent instead to be violent(i.e by force). A small group of people with the same goal can do wonders without being violent.
It's also become less and less common over time, as the focus on next quarter shareholder returns and hoarding of wealth even when past the point of ever being able to spend it all has increased every single year for decades. And this focus overrules everything else.
Syria had plenty of peaceful protests against Assad. Russia against Putin. China aginst the CCP. The participants generally aren't doing very well. Hong Kong had enormous, mass protests. Georgia (the country) has had big ones recently.
Occupy Wall Street was big and peaceful. What did that accomplish again? Everything they protested against has only intensified.
For something interesting consider the topical Roe v. Wade decision, both in its establishment and removal. That involved some significant questions of rights and was settled without violence. Protesting, on either side of the issue, was largely ineffective compared to small groups of organised people working to align the legal system over long periods of time.
He convinced one of his enemies, the USA, too eliminate one of his other enemies, Iraq's Sadam Hussein. (Or the US was incompetent enough to do that all by itself, hard for me to be sure).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li...
And the Taliban is back in charge of Afghanistan.
> Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
No, it didn't. On the other hand, it triggered such a response from Israel as to make Israel a pariah in the eyes of many, and attempts at prosecution for genocide — something I have been told motivated some of the Israeli protesters against Netinyahu.
How had it been going up until that point? Very poorly too. The idea that peaceful protests by Palestinians would've changed that would be so awfully naive that I've never even encountered that argument.
It's too easy to forget that even our beloved weekends were only achieved after bloodshed.
The people in power successfully managed to sell us the belief that we can achieve change by sitting on our asses and yelling really loud. If we spend 5 minutes thinking about the current power structures, it's clear that no amount of peaceful protesting will ever achieve any meaningful change.
The only real power we have is to withhold our labor on strikes, and somehow even those need permission (!) to run.
It passed through moral persuasion and nonviolent activism.
Your statement is factually incorrect. There are dozens of other examples.
My guess is that if race was determined at birth by chance (instead of genetics) we would have the same racial distribution on a societal level but race issues would move faster.
This seemed implausible, so I checked. It does not appear to be true. It's been continuously true since 2013, and you currently have five.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_Unite...
That's a 50% increase.
Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?
So, assuming all of them aren't CS, under 27%...?
I think I may have miscommunicated there—I'm not saying that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the national government for a few years and push a bunch of bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going through the motions of equity and then expect anything you did to stick.
I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years ago, but we're nowhere near where we started.
Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs.
That sounds proportional?
I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?
That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.
Who is the "they" here. Whenever I see a pronoun (especially "they" it's always "they") with no referent, I ask this question.
You must consider a man's race if this concerns something relevant to that consideration such as their medical history. This is not one of them; there are actually very few instances where asking a man's race is necessary.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/man
>1a(1): an individual human
>b: the human race : HUMANKIND
>c: a bipedal primate mammal (Homo sapiens) that is anatomically related to the great apes but distinguished especially by notable development of the brain with a resultant capacity for articulate (see ARTICULATE entry 1 sense 1a) speech and abstract reasoning, and is the sole living representative of the hominid family
And "a man" doesn't refer to mankind/humankind.
and yet, why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]?
DEI isn't about equity, it's about affirmative action. And i am fundamentally against affirmative action.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
There's no way this isn't just disingenuousness on your part. Or do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
no one is depriving anyone's rights to apply and tryout, but there's certainly a lack of affirmative action in these teams. And no one bats an eye about it - it's only natural apparently.
So i am asking why is this affirmative action must exist for companies hiring, but not for the NBA?
You can remove white people from the equation entirely, if it makes it easier. Asians comprise 6% of the US population and only 0.2% of the NBA, and it's much the same story in the NFL. Should then therefore be a concerted push to increase the number of Asian players in those leagues?
What you should want in priority is to get the descendents of former slaves to have a prominent place in society, include them as equals and make them powerful. I can understand that, they built the US same as the other invaders, and maybe even the natives should be more present in american society.
But brown ? Im French, and sadly not brown, I wish I was ofc, but why would an Indian from Calcutta be more "diverse" than me from Normandy ? Skin color is as interesting as hair color, it means nothing. Say "descendent of slaves", Indians and Europeans if you want to rank people by order of priority, maybe ?
For me that's why these DEI things are wrong, they're racist in a way. They divide people across skin color boundaries that make no sense.
If we talked less about skin color, and a bit more about the actual nature of people (I can accept positive discrimination towards former slave families, they deserve compensation), maybe we'd accept those DEI policies more ?
It's a complex debate everywhere anyway, we have the same in France with our own colonial crosses to bear, and like what to do with a Tunisian freshly arrived vs a descendent of a Tunisian family who's been French for 3 generations.
Brown person can be a descendant of the “Coolies” taken as Indentured servants to Fiji, Trinidad, Suriname, Malaysia, SA etc.
They could be people from French colonies like Algeria as well.
Brown doesn’t only mean an Indian from Calcutta, although they were heavily persecuted until recently (Check Bengal Famine)
If we have solved all of the locally rooted problems already, then sure let’s go ahead and help others too. That isn’t the case though.
I think it’s insulting to descendants of American slaves to go from treating them as sub human not long ago straight to putting others’ past hardships at the same level as theirs in America.
Indians can go through totally normal immigration and hiring procedures, just like me: they're brown just because of the sun, just like Im white because the weather is shit in Normandy.
I personally think that it is not helpful to subscribe to 'sins of the father belong to the son' view of the world. Apart from everything else, it rewards near-constant cries of perceived injustices that drown any point you may have had about descendants of slaves.
Most diversity programs actively harm Indians as over represented, as they fall under the broad “Asian” category (see Harvard).
But I guess Indians are easy pickings these days.
The only thing I advocate for is on economic basis. Nothing else should matter.
If one is "poor" (for a socially acceptable definition of poor), we as a society must help them.
Skin color, historical persecution, country of origin,gender, sexual orientation or any of the thousand things that can be "different" , shouldn't matter.
I just find the american casual racism, both sides of the political spectrum, very ... american :D
In France we sort of pretend to ignore there s skin color. I d never describe someone as black, or no more than I d describe someone as blonde and I would almost never use a French word to describe it. It makes me nervous to reduce someone to this random attribute, when maybe his family came from Mali, or Martinique or the US and that's so much more interesting than the effect of the sun on his skin.
I am not an American, and I'm brown. I don't take issue if someone says I'm brown because I am brown! Maybe I cannot empathize with other races who've been extremely discriminated because of their skin color, but as you said, it is an attribute describing me, among hundred others. I also agree, color of skin by itself is not interesting at all, just like being blonde is not interesting at all - but may play into personal preferences, again, just like any of the hundreds of physical, personality attributes.
And yes, of course many African-Americans have certain cultural traits, some heritage etc. that sets them apart, but I would describe that as "African-American" and not "black" because I don't think that a Nigerian or a Sri Lankan would share those traits.
When Donald Trump insisted that Kamala Harris wasn't really black that just made no sense to me.
What should have happened is we should have started to support the early childhood development of underprivileged single mothers. And mandated all of them to have home visits to make sure they are being good mothers. The issue with specifically black American culture is one that has to start in early development. Once they have grown up in a broken household they are essentially unsavable at the macro level. You can’t reverse the neglect, trauma and core belief structure once they enter the criminal justice system. And all this DEI bs simply pampers the deluded belief that people are not being treated fairly. People are treated according to how they act and behave. The disproportionate number of black people in jail is not a misalignment of justice. It’s a misalignment with morals and culture.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery...
This sounds unreasonable. If Europe can forget about Germany messing with everyone some 80 years ago, then so can the US forget about slavery.
If there’s continuing trauma, it isn’t caused by what happened 100 years ago, it’s because it is still being perpetuated somehow.
That might be what you are trying to say, but I had to read it a few times to see it.
Europe has not forgotten about that, other than in terms of formal politics.
Hell, England has not even forgotten about the Norman conquest of 1066.
It does help somewhat that Germany has made really serious efforts to repudiate its own behavior, the culture that enabled it, and efforts to revive it. Much harder to say that about the equivalents for US slavery.
I feel that's overstating it a bit. But my mother (English) was definitely brought up in a context that had not forgotten about Napoleon - Napoleon was viewed/presented as comparable to Hitler.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/high-h...
I'd really like to see some differentiation between:
* a disproportionate number of people of Norman descent remain some of the wealthiest landowners in England
* a disproportion number of the wealthiest landowners in England are of Norman descent
Are there injustices being perpetrated by the institutions today? Lets call them out.
Injustices perpetrated generations ago belong in history books. We cant forget about them but Im not going to be held responsible for them.
Take redlining for instance. That happened a long time ago. Redlining systematically and intentionally deprived non-white families of home ownership, while helping white families to own homes. But wealth begets wealth, so owning a home lets someone borrow money against it to start a business. When these people die, their children will inherit their wealth. As a result, the (grand)children of a family are still denied opportunities that they would've gotten, if not for redlining.
The creator of VeggieTales has a great video on this! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGUwcs9qJXY
P.S. Yes, a family who was able to get a home loan (redlining didn't affect them) might have squandered this wealth gambling, or maybe they didn't pass it onto their children, so some people unaffected by redlining may still end up in a similar place. Similarly, some families that were affected by redlining have still managed to accumulate wealth in spite of redlining. My claim is that the family that squandered their money still got the chance to squander was was given to them, and the injustice is that the redlined family was denied that opportunity.
Right, but the median debate isn't about whether there was in fact past injustice done via discrimination on racial lines. The median person agrees. The debate is whether present discrimination on racial lines is required to "correct" that past injustice, and whether that would be a form of present justice. There's very little agreement on that.
Yes! welcome to black lives matter. But, that seems to have been labeled a terrorist group for some reason.
Only ever said by someone that’s part of the establishment.
Real change that will jot be classified that way has to happen by engaging with the process for change- though I definitely recognise that its a lot slower and more difficult.
So too is it more difficult to save up money instead of robbing a bank, but it doesn't mean you’re morally justified to rob a bank to give to charity vs working and giving a percentage of a paycheck.
Please use a different example
[0] https://nypost.com/2023/10/10/blm-chicago-under-fire-for-pro...
They celebrated an attack on Israel that resulted in deaths and kidnapping of hundreds of innocent music festival goers and kibbutznicks the day after that vicious attack.
The fact that you don’t care what I ( or people like me - whatever that means) think is irrelevant to the discussion
Every government wants to "forget". France maintained a viewpoint that Vichy was a "few bad apples" until the evidence of deporting Jews until their death was undeniable.
That's politics. Many Europeans are certainly still hurting from the trauma the wars caused. That includes later born generations.
Culturally, the two world wars have had a great impact, but that's another story.
My main point is that individually experienced trauma does transmit over generations, while great national narrative can change relatively quickly.
Germany paid massive amounts of reparations for the sins of the Nazis, and on top of that, Nazi leadership was executed.
It's simply ignorant to think a citation to post-war Germany is a winning argument for you.
Germany probably shouldn’t forget the genocide of millions of people from a variety of groups, just as the united states should not forget the systematic enslavement and repression of millions of people, who are also americans and their descendants are alive and numerous today. It doesn’t really make sense to me why people should forget that, and it cannot be forgotten by the people still living with the consequences of it today - but I’m not really willing to be baited into this type of discussion on a platform like this, so I’ll just say your fundamental premises in your post sound flawed if not extremely troubling in what you seem to be implying. It sounds completely unreasonable to say for instance, indigenous groups should forget they were pretty much wiped out by largely white colonizers. This isn’t a political statement, it’s just a matter of fact.
And if were to say "...but those colonizers are no longer alive, and neither are their children.", is that not also a fact?
Or is my wording a political statement but yours is not?
I don't know that we can be so uneven in our evaluation.
Doesn’t mean we should forget them. But getting angry at someone now because of something that his great grandfather did to your great grandfather is a great way for these grudges to never die.
No one is holding people responsible for actions they didn't take. YOu're just mis-perceiving assistance given to historically oppressed people as a personal slight against yourself.
Helping a black person is not punishing a white person, and you're showing your own ass when you suggest it is.
The thing about oppression is that it causes both long-lasting and recurring trauma. The people targeted will be hurt for a long time, and they will be the target of follow-up attacks because other bullies know they can get away with it.
In the specific case of Nazi Germany, exterminating the Jews was not an original idea of Hitler. Hitler's only original idea was taking shittons of methamphetamine. Martin Luther had done the legwork of radicalizing Germany into hating Jews; once Germany had become a functionally unified nation-state the Holocaust was a forgone conclusion. This is the core belief of Zionism[0]: that the only way to stop Jews from becoming victims is for those Jews to form their own nation-state that can commit its own atrocities.
BTW, this is the same logic the Japanese had in their head when they started invading and destroying the rest of East Asia, around the same time as Hitler. They wanted to be respected in the way that the Christian Bible would describe as "having the fear of God". The fact that this led to the horrific rape of China and Korea[1] would suggest that these victim narratives are morally self-defeating without some framework of reciprocal[2] tolerance and human rights to distinguish between justified self-defense and unjustified oppression.
But America at least sort of has that, so we can make that distinction. In fact, that's part of what makes American race relations so weirdly straightforward. In the "old world" you have complicated webs of peoples angry at each other for shit that happened anywhere from ten to ten thousand years ago. But in America, there's just one very deep wound that never seems to heal.
When does America "forget" slavery? Well, ideally, we don't 'forget', but we do 'forgive'. Practically, however, we can't. Every time a cop thinks it'd be a good idea to treat a criminal suspect like a demon in DOOM Eternal, and it hits social media, we get a huge reminder of "oh, there's still people in this country who think it's OK to do this to black people".
[0] I'm a Mormon[3], so I'm morally obligated to point out that we fell into this rhetorical trap, too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mountain_Meadows_Massacre
[1] And yes, they still complain about it, too. It doesn't help that Japan's ruling LDP was run by a war crimes denialist for a decade and change.
[2] As in, "tolerate all except the intolerant." See also: the GNU General Public License.
[3] I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're referring to as Mormonism, is in fact, LDS/Mormonism, or as I've recently taken to calling it, LDS plus Mormonism. Mormonism is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning LDS system made useful by the LDS Doctrine & Covenants, the Old & New Testaments, and the Pearl of Great Price comprising a full testament as defined by Jesus.
2 million institutionalized slaves (per 13th amendment) in the US today, around the same as 1830 USA
50 million worldwide as of a few years ago
And often conflicts heavily with the type of life most groups/people want to live, and the type of work most people want to do.
Especially historically under represented groups.
It doesn’t mean people in any of those groups can’t or won’t be able to do it well.
But it does mean, statistically, is there won’t be a lot of them (from a sheer numbers perspective), and if you want a lot of them you’ll need to actively fight significant cultural and personal tendencies for a long period of time.
Especially since experienced people take decades to train, and are the result of massive amounts of filtering. Probably not 1 in 200 or fewer new hires will ever end up as an experienced Staff Eng, 1 in 500 as a Senior staff Eng, etc.
If you’re a large company, that means you have a huge pipeline problem, if for instance, you need to hit some target number of people with some coarse criteria of color/race/gender/sex, whatever.
Because there probably just literally aren’t that many that meet any other criteria you would use. Either because they got filtered out due to some discrimination thing too early on, so never had time to grow to the level you need, or just went ‘meh’ and chose some other different path.
But for many years now, the DOL in the US has been requiring large companies to hit mandatory percentages meeting those coarse criteria. For some criteria, decades, but for most less than an decade. And have been enforcing it.
So 1) you can only move the needle so far, before every potentially plausible recruit could be hired, if you try to do it right now, and 2) in many cases, the issue is the groups involved just flat out don’t want to do/be that thing enough, for a ton of reasons.
One big issue in California in the Latino and Black communities for instance, is investing in schooling is seen as a serious ‘nerd’/uncool thing, same with professional employment. So both those communities have huge issues with grades and education. There are also historic issues with ‘the man’ smacking down members of those groups if they try.
East Asians (and US Indians) see education as a competitive necessity, and professional employment as a measure of success - the classic ‘Asian Parents’ trope is very real. They have had issues with ‘the man’, but have managed to mostly sidestep them, and are very highly represented in education and professional employment. To the point they have been actively penalized in many Affirmative Action programs.
If it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, you can’t get 10 babies with 10 women in 1 month. Even more so when 9 of them are on birth control.
This is not meant to be inflammatory. I’ve had many conversations with black men about this, they actually put the idea in my head.
https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/us/whitewashing-...
Women are woefully represented and under paid in pretty all work forces.
The same also applies to people of colour.
If the developed west didn’t have an issue with these groups we would have equality, from where I’m sitting things don’t look that equal!
Exactly. And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
This is just demonstrably untrue. For nearly a century the Soviet Union succeeded by doing exactly that. They had international support from the progressive types too.
The Republicans in charge of two school districts near me have been trying to organize book burnings for the last two years.
Get back to me when it's the Democrats.
I keep hearing about Republican book bans, but I've only heard they don't want certain books to be available to children in schools, not that they should be banned in general. Compare this with liberals who got some Dr. Seuss and other books cancelled and removed from Amazon etc.
It's seems like both sides attempt to decrease accessibility to literature that they find objectional, but neither has achieved an actual ban.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_burning
I guess if you think this is fine then that's what you think.
It's not about "what I think is fine." It's about equal rights to speech.
Donald Trump was re-elected. He has said that we should deport pro-palestinian protestors on college campuses and has sued multiple news outlets, both on tv and in paper, for their coverage during the election season. It's really hard to find any political figure who is more aggressively targeting speech he doesn't like than Trump.
But at the same time, both the progressives and the conservatives who are active on political social media (take your pick of platform) are very likely to actively attempt to silence the opposition and punish them for speaking.
It's less a political divide and more that most people are still tolerant of dissenting speech, so the people you know in person will tend to be tolerant. There's a loud minority that's vocal on the internet on both sides that advocates for silencing others.
Which side is often going to court (and losing) to dispute facts (like election integrity or sexual assault allegations)?
We have dozens of programs that were later legislated against or later ruled illegal by courts. There was no time Progressives were against racism. Notable black leaders like Malcolm X correctly pointed out that white Progressives never supported black people — but were appropriating their voices as a cudgel against other white people, eg in an internal power struggle of the Democratic Party where the northern Progressive faction drove out the Dixiecrats.
2025 is the year that Progressives need to accept their perennial racism is no longer acceptable, even if they appropriate the language of civil rights to justify their continued bigotry.
I'm trying to put in flat terms, but fundamentally power matters. This is the base of democracy: give people the power to change things, there needs to be a fear that these people will exercise their power.
Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime.
And also people are way more influenced by their everyday environments than nice speeches. Having a nation that values diversity helps more to also embrace these ideals, than living in a racist dictatorship and fighting at every corner to keep your minority voices in your heart.
> It's a slow, painful process
The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger. Women lost abortion rights over a few weeks (the leading to that was also long and slow, but when it finally happens it doesn't take much). Foreign people lost the right to return to their US home within days when the ban happened last time.
Power matters.
Yes. Probably multiple lifetimes. This is why I say that real change takes generations.
You cannot have a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs. You can either strip the people who hold reprehensible beliefs of the vote, or you can work diligently over generations to change the culture. But as long as you have a democracy, you will never be able to create change that sticks by simply wielding the power temporarily granted to you.
Wield that power too forcefully, and you'll get pushback, and unsavory politicians will ride that pushback to power. When that happens, as you observe, a lot of what was previously accomplished is undone.
I believe that democracy is the greatest good progressivism has ever accomplished. I'm not willing to sacrifice democracy in order to speed up the rate of change, even if it means that people suffer in the short term. And because I believe in democracy, I cannot support the heavy-handed use of power to try to force people to change. Not for their sakes, but because it simply doesn't work. As long as those people have the vote, they will resent you for your use of power and be able to strip it from you. That's the lesson of 2024.
That's not to say we can't do anything while in power, but it must be done with an eye towards the next century, not just the next election cycle.
> The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger.
The trap is accidentally triggering a reactionary movement by moving too hard too fast. Reactionaries aren't called that by accident—they react. It is within the power of progressives to avoid triggering them by staying within (whilst steadily changing) the national Overton window.
Voter suppression has repeatedly happened and has been mostly scuff free [0]. Working diligently through generation also means building the means to protect the advancement you achieve, and not just by having them in the rules, but to be able to enforce these rules.
My mental image of this is Tulsa: when you steadily but firmly create a vibrant place for your community for decades, to have it burn in flames within a day, with no significant reparation, no significant support, and just a footnote in some textbooks.
When I say "power" I don't mean in some limited framing, I mean anything that can actually leverage your position in a realistic way. Capital, cultural influence, military or political power come to mind, but whatever form it takes, I think a group needs to be able to stand its ground if it chalenges the status quo, whatever time frame it chooses to do it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite...
All people have some degree of racist tendencies - regardless of gender, sex, color, etc. And criminal tendencies. And other tendencies.
And what actual consequences will be applied that impact one group or another tend to go in cycles/pendulum back and forth (and hence impact what percent of the population is going to do x, and how many will see real consequences for those actions).
That is because when one group overdoes it (or is perceived to), enough people get tired of that group/outraged, and then things shift. And these patterns tend to be on coarse criteria like gender/sex/color/race/language, etc. because the most brazen users of any sort of shitty force/violence/shaming/whatever are exactly the type of people who are the shittiest. And every group of people have a percent that is shitty.
For instance, for many years now shame has been a major consequence, along with legal action.
So eventually, we end up with a group/leader essentially immune to shame and legal action, who is now going to use do all sorts of shameless and illegal things. Really, a large group of people like that. And who don’t mind violence (or the threat of it) as a potential consequence.
Eventually, being a shameless crook will fall out of fashion (or will have finally hurt/pissed off enough people), and another counter group will rise to take it’s place.
Often, when it gets particularly ugly/strong in one direction or another, there is also a corresponding backlash against the particularly strong users of the prior ‘fashion’ of power.
Sometimes beheadings, or ostracizing, or legal harassment, or whatever.
Weinstein getting what he got (as deserved as it was), was one swing. We’ll see who gets this next counter reaction.
Why do you think the dems and tech companies are going out of their way to be as friendly to the incoming admin as they are? They know the score, and are trying to avoid getting whacked.
Or, to quote an old western - ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it’.
This swinging pendulum is really the tough part, and the nazi trend coming back in force after a black president was there for 8 years is the most symbolic image of it.
In the current situation though, the money doesn't seem to be swinging around, so I wonder how far it could even swing back. That's part of what I mean by "power", the current changes we're witnessing are huge shifts of money in one specific camp, and I don't imagine heads rolling either, so outside of a completely unforseen even wildly resetting the scene, it looks kinda toast to me.
ETA: and do you think that number will increase, stagnate, or decrease with DEI gone, and why?
Things improve on their own over time too.
15 years ago in any movie a software engineer was considered the biggest loser ever, ridiculed, and unattractive. I think if I had to choose any single thing that increased female participation in engineering the most, it was the Iron Man movies, which showed a vision of high social status in an engineer and started to break the stereotypes.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01300026
In tech it might be a different story, but all I've seen where the stats decrease until 2020, and haven't seen much data covering the recent years. Was there any significant increase above what the other fields have seen ?
I've worked in Wall Street tech for 20 years, and while the demographics of my coworkers have changed, it largely had nothing to do with DEI or other recruitment efforts.
In the late 90s/early 00s it was FSU Russians&Ukrainians living in South Brooklyn & US born and/or raised Cantonese speaking Chinese from downtown. By late 00s, percent of Indians started to tick upwards. In 2010s, mainland Chinese students on visas ticked way up, and in 2020s one of the fastest growing groups was actually female mainland Chinese students. Campus recruiting may pat themselves on the back about finally growing the % of women, but this was largely downstream of enrollment & degree choices made by these women many years before.
In many ways it's gotten a lot better as all these different groups largely work wherever in the organization. 15-20 years ago there was a big problem with the Indian UI guy loading his team with Indians, the Chinese data guy loading his team with Chinese, and the Russian backend lead hiring all Russians. You could guess what team people were on by their face, and they'd often slip into their native languages at work. Not the best for collaboration.
Also agree that real change of hearts & minds is slow going over generations, and can't be legislated. That said we have made and continue to make a lot of progress. Anyone who has been alive more than 20 years should be able to recognize US culture in 2020s is so different than even 2008, 1999, 1990, or the 1980s..
I think some people mix 1) cultural change (acceptable words people use / ok jokes people make) with 2) legal changes (gay marriage rights / expanded legal protections from discrimination) and finally 3) outcome changes (higher % of group going to college / lower % of group being poor / etc). 1 moves faster than 2 which moves faster than 3. I think that's because each is downstream of the preceding change. You can't directly change outcomes in a short time span.
There are countless instances throughout history of lasting change being sparked by a single moment. Sure, that moment is frequently the culmination of some period of struggle, but you have to remember that the issues that came to a head and sparked those DEI initiatives a few years ago were exactly that—the product of literally centuries of struggle. Or, perhaps more accurately, a recent phase of that struggle.
So, I believe your emphasis is on the wrong side of the equation here. That is, it's not that there is an inherent deficiency in a trending moment or ascendant party giving rise to change. It's the explicit pushback against DEI that is responsible for its unwinding. And, this effort was not successful because the party that sponsored the pushback was ascendant. Instead, part of the party's ascension was due to it making an issue of the pushback. More specifically, the blowback was part of a divisive theme, along with illegal immigration and other issues.
Progress is not a one-way street and gains are not de facto insulated against erosion. Progress (and its security) is a product of the mores and culture of a time, and these can be influenced and manipulated. So, there is really not such a thing as "lasting change", and that's what we saw here. In some ways, the blowback has taken us not just back to our pre-DEI state, but to a pre-1960s mental footing.
You're right that there are tipping points, but they don't come at will, they come when the culture is ready for them. Push too soon, and as you note, you may actually undo progress that had already been truly won.
Culture behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid: manipulate it gently and it flows smoothly. Apply too much stress too fast, and it turns into a solid and resists you. Trump did not invent that resistance, he simply untapped it and rode it to power. The progressive movement created the resistance by applying too much pressure to a culture that wasn't ready.
And, your claim argues against itself. The problem is that minds can be changed in either direction, and the people who "didn't believe in any of it" had been precondtioned to reach that position of non-support before DEI was even a thing.
Likewise, Trump was able to manipulate people based on age-old tactics or, as you put it, he "untapped" existing resistance. So how, exactly, do progressives convince these same people?
You're suggesting they do so by not moving too fast? That they wait for the "culture to be ready for change"?
If we waited for the culture to be ready, then schools in the South would still be segregated. Instead, they were integrated under the protection of men holding rifles.
Of course the status quo doesn't change without pressure. That's why it's the status quo. There is no amount of progressive pace calibration that would have addressed this. If there was, then 400 years should have been enough time.
Again, the problem is not with progressive pacing. The problem is on the other side.
Of course it was, and so is this latest effort from Meta. I'm sure if there was some anti-Brazilian group in power in Washington or something, you'd see Meta shutting down their offices in Rio.
AKA. Cheerleading for the power structures.
I've witnessed the DEI transformation from the inside - which amounted to a chief diversity officer being hired, a lot of incredibly sanctimonious online trainings got scheduled for us, and rainbow flags started popping up in the weirdest places.
A few coworkers I had, who checked a lot of the boxes got dragged into interviews and company events (which some found somewhat uncomfortable). Very little changed in practice, and if you didn't care to read the company newsletter (who does that anyway), then you didn't experience much of it.