It boils down to a core philosophical difference - do you want to emphasize equal access to opportunity, or do you want to emphasize equal outcomes? Some would argue it isn't an either-or thing, and we can do both at once, but I argue mandated equality of outcomes is insidious and causes social strife.
If you are a minority and get hired, and the company has an explicit policy of hiring N% of minorities, then you will always wonder (as will all other employees) whether you were hired because of your minority status or because of your actual skills. This is very bad for morale and self worth.
I don't think the minorities themselves were consulted. Perhaps it is being instituted by a minority, but they do not represent the preferences of people they purport to help with these policies.
I think the UC university system has it right because they ban racial preferences for admitting students. While overall the percentage of certain racial minorities is lower there, those that do get in feel accomplished and deserving. This is a better outcome for society and personal self worth.
The problem is companies do DEI as marketing, and equal opportunity is invisible. If there are fewer black ballet dancers it doesn't necessarily mean that there's discrimination or racial barriers, it could just be that black people are less interested in that career. Further, different communities vary greatly in age, for example. The median age for Mexican Americans is 25, compared with 49 for American Jews. So you would expect to see a big difference in distribution for, say, senior positions within these racial groups even in a world with zero racial discrimination.
On the other hand, if you only emphasize equal access of opportunity you will never reach equal outcomes. White men have centuries of cultural expectations, family wealth, and other advantages, and minorities have none of those advantages, and may be only a few decades (if that) removed from illiterate, impoverished inequality.
Give those groups equal opportunity and it's unsurprising when an inequality of outcomes is perpetuated, observe that inequality of outcomes long enough and you start to foment the idea that maybe those people aren't actually intrinsically equal.
Our office has a similar problem as a woman-owned business... The WBENC seal is valuable for winning bids in the government and aerospace industries, where regulatory measures encourage taking contracts with us over those that are still in the "old boys' club." Are we actually providing more value than our competition? Are we as innovative and sharp as we think we are? Or is much of the work we build together only selected because it satisfies some regulatory checkbox?
I don't know, but I'd rather suffer that social strife and doubt for a few decades in my generation, wondering about my own accomplishments and worthiness, than kick the can down the road and leave the inequality unaddressed. I believe that temporarily creating equal outcomes, while temporarily problematic, will be a much faster route towards long-term equality than doing nothing.
Can you name a single place which has equality of opportunity and where black people were somehow still unable to prosper?
In California, the equality of outcome groups in Sacramento are trying to lower the educational bar to the federally mandated minimum. The result is that most people reading this with kids in California will use their wealth to supplement public education (or pay for private schools), while people in poorer districts won’t have that option. They already defunded science and art, state wide, and the equity brigade tried to defund high school calculus last year.
And yet Asian Americans and Jewish Americans significantly outperform those white men. And in the last several decades, women have outperformed men in university and in the 2010s in the workforce, too. This analysis does not hold up to close scrutiny.
The only thing minorities lack is a proper value system. There are multiple immigrant groups that start from nothing and achieve upper middle-class status in a generation's time. Once we realize, as a society, that what minorities really need is internal support to reform their cultural systems, only then will minorities will empower themselves to do better.
> In Martin Luther King's day, the line was that all that was needed was equality of opportunity.
If you actually read and/or listen to King's speeches and writings, rather than just passively consume the propaganda image constructed by exactly the forces King railed against, you would know that it wasn't, at least not the way you seem to be thinking. King explicitly saw as necessary radical redistribution to acheive much greater equality of material condition (see, e.g., the “Three Evils” speech); he did not buy into the idea that material conditions that are the outcome of systems of distribution of scarce resources could be cleanly severed from “opportunity”, such that you could have even rough equality of the latter with gross inequality of the former.
>There are multiple immigrant groups that start from nothing and achieve upper middle-class status in a generation's time
You can't compare an immigrant group, which is _most likely_ elite in their home countries (it is very expensive and very difficult to immigrate to the united states), to minorities in America who have seen their family units destroyed as recently as 60 years ago.
You can point to the success of Nigerian-Americans; one of, if not the most educated[1] racial group in the US. If you are an immigrant from Nigeria, the second richest country in Africa by GDP, the US as a result of its immigration policies simply selects for the best and brightest.
Minorities "lacking a value system" (??), isn't something innate to their culture. It's been a purposeful policy for America for most of it's lifetime. Just look at the Tulsa Race Massacre; it was an incredible destruction of future generational and cultural wealth for the people who you now say "lack a value system".
>minorities really need is internal support to reform their cultural systems
There are multiple ways to approach this but it tends to be labeled as socialism, woke-ism, CRT, or DEI.
>I think the UC university system has it right because they ban racial preferences for admitting students.
The UC system only did so because they were mandated to by law (specifically a voter initiative), and they still try to use as many proxies for race as possible in order to try and be racist in their admissions policies.
> and they still try to use as money proxies for race
But that's completely legitimate. If black people (for example) are systemically poorer than white people as a group, it makes sense to give them more help.
It's favoring a wealthy black person over a poor white person, that's arguably problematic.
But that's completely legitimate. If [Asian|Jewish] people (for example) are systemically [better at university] than white people as a group, it makes sense to [hold them to much higher standards than white people in university admissions].
No, it doesn't. Your statement assumes that a university population should have a certain makeup of races. Let in the best of the lot regardless of color. If that makes the university population mostly Asian or Jewish so be it. That means that everybody else is resting on their laurels and not actually competitive in the market for university positions.
Every color of person is capable of performing at the same level as any other. However, not every person is capable of performing at the level some universities require. There are dummies and geniuses in every color/racial group. There are high achievers and low achievers in every group. Every single human attribute is a bell curve in the general population. By not picking the best of the lot regardless of how the result looks we are damaging the ability of the nation to compete.
You said: But that's completely legitimate. If [Asian|Jewish] people (for example) are systemically [better at university] than white people as a group, it makes sense to [hold them to much higher standards than white people in university admissions].
As an Asian man, i'll agree. Except instead of levelers, these are usually used as bludgeons to punish groups rather than leveling groups. Based on the UMich and other college lawsuits, what we found out was that Asians were held to higher standards, except Jewish people werent. Neither were wealthy Protestants. Neither were well connected white people.
The "Progressive" systems used the excuse of DEI to help discriminate against Asians and others they didnt like.
Now, you ask the same policy makers, can I as an Asian man be allowed into the basketball or football team, and they look at you like "but youre not qualified"
> If [Asian|Jewish] people (for example) are systemically [better at university] than white people as a group, it makes sense to [hold them to much higher standards than white people in university admissions].
What does equal access mean? If I go to an all purple school, and focus my sourcing fro new hires on my school, then my company will by construction be more purple than the overall population without any explicit discriminatory treatment after that. If I broaden my sourcing is that discriminating against minorities? If I know that school B does a better job of interview prep than school A should I take that into account? Am I hiring for SAT scores or predicted performance on the job? It's much messier than just "equal access or equal outcome" because access and outcomes are continuous processes.
Fully agree. I think it’s damaging to a society to assign a spokesperson for certain groups that wasn’t “elected”, but rather given the position, prestige, and reputation due to fitting in that group.
Thus it perpetuates the in-group, and causes the symptoms you’ve mentioned with equality of outcome derived solutions.
I think we need to decouple the reparations discussion from the affirmative action discussion.
You can make a case that descendants of slaves and victims of Jim Crow laws and red lining policies deserve some kind of compensation.
But arbitrarily engineering the racial and gender composition of universities and industries is treating a symptom, not the underlying causes of current disparities.
If you are a minority and get hired, and the company has an explicit policy of hiring N% of minorities, then you will always wonder (as will all other employees) whether you were hired because of your minority status or because of your actual skills. This is very bad for morale and self worth.
I don't think the minorities themselves were consulted. Perhaps it is being instituted by a minority, but they do not represent the preferences of people they purport to help with these policies.
I think the UC university system has it right because they ban racial preferences for admitting students. While overall the percentage of certain racial minorities is lower there, those that do get in feel accomplished and deserving. This is a better outcome for society and personal self worth.