In zero cases have I heard of of any DEI efforts talk about economically disadvantaged candidates. It's always pop culture visible or sexual diversity.
That's definitely true. As an example, if you're a low-class white male kid, you're actually quite disadvantaged compared to the general population (for example in educational outcomes). But the DEI initiatives in most companies won't recognize this, as they often don't look past skin color and gender.
The argument there is that people from under-represented populations have to face discrimination regardless of their economic status. This is why DEI looks at the whole cross section of socio-economic status, and not just the economic part.
To put it simply, a poor white student from rural Alabama only needs a proper accent and a good suit to blend in with the upper-classes. However, a black student only needs to lose access to their parents money and they immediately have a longer harder uphill battle to fight against racism which will presume them to be uneducated, underperforming, and generationally poor unless they work 2x as hard to prove it wrong.
That said...
I do think there's a danger in supporting DEI programs simply because they have good outcomes (which other posters are doing). If a group achieves your end-results but doesn't have your philosophy, then my life experience (e.g. MAGA) has shown that they will become the enemy that you don't see until it's too late.
It is you who make the unrealistic claim that the least represented group can't possibly be discriminated against. Provide strong evidence that they aren't discriminated against in education, then we can talk, until then it is fair to assume that DEI initiatives is pushing out poor white men in favor of other groups because that is what the statistics tells us.
It also tells us why rich people love DEI based on race and gender, it is because it only pushes out poor white men and not rich white men, rich white men are still there.
DEI is applied broadly, for example here's a list of demographics targeted for DEI from one of Biden's executive orders [1]:
The initiative will advance opportunity for communities that have historically faced employment discrimination and professional barriers, including: people of color; women; first-generation professionals and immigrants; individuals with disabilities; LGBTQ+ individuals; Americans who live in rural areas; older Americans who face age discrimination when seeking employment; parents and caregivers who face employment barriers; people of faith who require religious accommodations at work; individuals who were formerly incarcerated; and veterans and military spouses.
I can rattle some off, I guess? Institutional DEI can be elitist, furthering the interests of well-off credentialed people at the expense of those it claims to help; performative; a way of short-circuiting real debates about values that are uncomfortable or that cut against elite interests; largely defined in terms relevant to competing groups of rich white people; a surreptitious way of laundering policy arguments that have nothing to do with righting past injustices ("equity-washing"); counterproductive, in the sense of organizing and motivating opposition to social justice by adopting the language least persuasive to those who need to be persuaded, and, further, by reducing the effectiveness of organizations that would otherwise naturally work to reduce inequality. I'm sure there's a bunch more.
You're asking that question, I assume, as a bid for a show of good faith that I'm not just knee-jerking anything that opposes "diversity" efforts. That's fair enough! I don't know that we want to litigate the whole concept, though; I'm just here to point out a really bad argument.
Beats me. It's far from self evident to me too, but this is the case for a ton of jobs both in the private and public sectors.
I'm just saying that their are very real issues about diversity, equity, and inclusion that need to be addressed. Regardless of whether, or how much, current DEI offices are doing so.
I have no anecdotal experience. But it's worth asking a broader number of people. Especially among the peoples who are historically more marginalized or less likely to graduate.
Here's the corollary of that: how does typical DEI actually help equality of opportunity? Put another way, do you think a black student from a wealthy family in San Jose or a poor white student from rural Alabama needs more help? Now show me a real-world DEI program that would help the white student instead of the black one.
It becomes very obvious when you start to analyze along economic lines instead of intersectional ones
A white woman growing up poor in a trailer park and a black woman growing up poor in the inner city are more likely to have similar struggles than the poor black woman and an upper middle class black woman
The upper middle class black woman is the one who is the token representation in a professional setting. She imagines her struggles represent the struggles of the poor black woman, but they don't
She probably did struggle more than her upper class white female colleagues, but her struggles were almost certainly very different from poor black women's struggles
So we wind up chasing our tails with these DEI initiatives, when the problems they claim to solve aren't about race diversity really. They're about class. You can't solve class problems by treating them as race problems
The real problem is the assumption race or gender are not only accurate proxies for diversity of thought (they’re not), but that they’re actually better proxies than just looking for diversity of thought directly.
You want more people from poor backgrounds so that you can take into account lower socioeconomic viewpoints? Well, the modern DEI answer to that is hire a black person. The correct answer is to hire someone that grew up poor.
As a visible minority, any such policy has me running for the hills. I'd like to be considered for my skill, because I know that I'll be working with people of a similar cut.
Granted its an archaic notion. Checking out from work, and checking in to DEI is probably a more financially successful endeavor.
Most marginally intelligent people understand that "DEI initiatives" are all about virtue signalling that do little to nothing except make people feel uncomfortable. Many people who study the issue have concluded that these "DEI initiatives actually lead to worse outcomes.
The issue is that there are many who suffer from generational poverty and are not “diverse”. The DEI benefits should go to all of disadvantaged people regardless of skin color. And there are many wealthy African Americans. Why are they getting the benefits of DEI vs the generationally low income white kid?
A cursory look at the way DEI policies are applied shows the claimed justification to be a blatant lie.
If we were actually concerned about tipping the scales properly based on actual income data, white men would not be the primary targets. We would be going after Brahmin Indians, Taiwanese-Americans, Jewish-Americans, men over 6 feet in height, men with facial features that are shown by studies to be associated with "leadership", men born to well-connected families, and any number of other by-birth associations that are actually demonstrated by the data to have high correlations to income level.
"White men" are fairly average when it comes to income in the United States, yet we are gunning for them far more for income equity than we are for their obvious statistical superiors.
This, alone, demonstrates the lie underpinning equity efforts.
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