Item — HN Reader

The western idea of DEI has always puzzled me ever since I first came across it (or at least the D portion of DEI, which in my mind is the most important one).

I'm a Serb by blood and grew up in and have lived in Indonesia for the majority of my life, and I went to an international school with kids from quite literally every single corner of the earth, many of them being some exotic mix of various ethnicities.

Despite that, many of us are actually amazingly similar in many ways - We have a very distinct int'l kid accent that we all share, we grew up with extremely similar experiences, listening to the same music, being exposed to all the same things. Despite the superficial differences, I actually wouldn't call us a very diverse group at all when you really look at us. Some years later when I was studying, I met an int'l girl from the Bahamas and I was amazed at how similar her and my life were in many ways, despite being a literal ocean apart in completely different islands/nations. I had infinitely more in common with her than any other Serb I've ever met, yet alone the Dutch people I've met in my move to the Netherlands.

When I moved to NL, I instantly noticed that my friends and I were very different to the people there. Yet if some HR person would interview me, a white-skinned guy, and then my best friend, a black-skinned guy who has African/Japanese ancestry, I'd definitely be placed in the same "bucket" as the white Dutchies around me and my friend with the black Dutchies, despite him and I actually having identical experiences and mindsets and not really having anything in common with the Dutchies. This is, of course, understandable as an initial reaction, but my problem is that all the DEI shenanigans never get past that initial surface-level nonsense. I will probably never be labelled as anything other than "generic white guy" or perhaps at a stretch sometimes, the "eastern european guy".

I guess what I'm trying to get at in this strange ramble is that ultimately DEI should be focused on diversity of thought, and not just superficial characteristics, yet it never works out that way. Often the exact opposite, in fact, where viewpoints that don't match the superficial characteristics are often swatted away since those situations are harder to navigate than the cookie-cutter approach.

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As an Asian, the DEI idea and how it was executed puzzled me as well.

Apple's first VP of diversity said [1]:

> “Diversity is the human experience. I get a little bit frustrated when diversity or the term diversity is tagged to the people of color, or the women, or the LGBT.”

> “there can be 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men in a room and they’re going to be diverse too because they’re going to bring a different life experience and life perspective to the conversation.”

She had to resigned [2] for saying so. That really confused me, isn't what she said... true?

[1]: https://qz.com/1097425/apples-first-ever-vp-of-diversity-and... [2]: https://nypost.com/2017/11/17/apples-diversity-chief-lasts-j...

From my personal experience as a central European male, they would be missing women and their outputs would have predictable and easily rectified mistakes. Unless their customer base is 90% male and they are OK with that.

And it's exactly that the experience shapes us. In the West, gender roles are still very pronounced, shaping our experiences in certain ways. Males are taught to go for wins, females for maintainability for one.

I don't think it's implied that she's making the claim that this group is going to be perfectly representative of their target demographic. She's simply saying that there is heterogeneity in a group that is ostensibly homogenous through a DEI lens.

Gender roles are just as pronounced in the East; me being in China as I write this. Maybe this says a little bit more about our biology and a little bit less about structural bias.

The point of DEI is to have the widest possible distribution of life experience among the group. Of course 12 white, blue-eyed, blonde men would have different life paths, but if you project them on 2D graph and draw a circle around them, then the distance to the point of white blue-eyed woman would be about 5 diameters of that circle, and to the point of black transgender person - about 15 diameters.

The most meaningful and useful diversity would be that of social class, and yet that's the one kind of diversity the DEI bureaucracy isn't interested in diversifying.

I think the goals of a sufficiently complex and large system is what the results are.

There's a hegemony that controls vocally-progressive places like San Francisco, big tech companies, and universities.

People who espouse DEI also tend to espouse slogans like "psychological safety" and "bring your whole self to work." Unfortunately, those slogans are as thinly constructed as the Diversity example you called out: it's code for privileging particular groups of people who look trendy in recruitment materials and PR. If I actually brought my whole self to work, I'd be fired.

Ironically, people who are critical of such policies don't feel psychologically safe. They don't want to be prejudged to be assholes, who then don't get invited to parties or get managed out at work. So, people in predominantly progressive spaces don't say out loud that the emperor has no clothes.

When DEI was first introduced, its champions insisted Diversity would be broadly constructed - that it was about enhancing creativity and identifying blind spots. Instead, it too often really means "we want a token {black, gay, etc} {person, club, etc} because it's fashionable." Bring a totally different perspective and life experience but superficially look like the majority? "Sorry, that's not Diverse enough."

If these spaces actually welcomed diverse ideas (and skepticism in the scientific method sense), perhaps we could learn from the good parts of diversity and build a society that works better for everybody. Instead we get Affirmative Action dressed up in newer clothes and whispers to trustworthy friends "can I tell you what I really think?"

I identify very strongly with what you've written here.

A guy who studied at Eton and a guy who grew up in a rural village in Uganda couldn't be any more different regardless of whether they can both tick a Black African box on an application form.

The same is obviously true of a guy from a poor part of Glasgow vs. a guy who studied at Eton, regardless of whether both could tick a White British box.

It's so far from any reasonable sense of truth that I feel like I'm in some sort of bad acid trip whenever the topic comes up. To me, the act of trying to categorise people in this way is in and of itself horribly racist.

This occurs at business school in a big way. They hit diversity quotas with super rich kids from Mexico City who are probably direct descendants of the conquistadors who pillaged the people these diversity quotas are supposed to benefit.

It's amazing how shallow is the "Americanized" DEI perspective when you look at your country of origin and its neighbors. Former Yugoslavia is, comparatively, not very large, but it contains a whole lot of very diverse groups, sometimes so that the "melting pot" occasionally starts throwing angry sparks around. But to them, you're all just... "white". And thus your life experience must be also "white" and "privileged", right? Right?

Sometimes I really want to take all those privileged campus kids and their little twitter accounts and throw them into a Total Perspective Vortex.

It's "DEI by photography". You need to see DEI when you look at a photo of a group of employees.

"This is, of course, understandable as an initial reaction, but my problem is that all the DEI shenanigans never get past that initial surface-level nonsense"

It is literally all only about the surface-level - the surface of the body, the skin color. Defining diversity by this single trait is the opposite of diversity in my opinion, which your story shows quite well.

> I guess what I'm trying to get at in this strange ramble is that ultimately DEI should be focused on diversity of thought, and not just superficial characteristics, yet it never works out that way.

I think you're missing the point of DEI. The advertised purpose of DEI is to counteract racism. It's easy to be sympathetic to that objective if you look at recent history. For example, watch a movie made in the US as recently as the year 1990, and you'll see a stark under-representation of anyone Black. It's hard to chalk that up to different education levels, because it's not like acting requires formal education. Let's face it, it was racism. And this racism pervaded every industry, having inter-generational effects that compounded over time. The idea of DEI therefore is to act as an opposing force.

My main problem with DEI is it's corrosive to the social fabric. To constantly remind people of ethnicity is not a good idea. It should not be front of mind all the time. A shared civic identity should be front and center. There's also an anti-egalitarian anti-individual aspect to DEI thinking that I dislike. And the third thing that puts me off about DEI is the people who run these programs seem to be over-represented by ideological extremists and racists. Black supremacism type ideas are tolerated in these circles when they should be resolutely discarded as ethnonationalist nonsense. It is hard to fully support it until they purge themselves of such personalities.

In 1990, 12% of the population was Black. [1] In California, they were 6-8% of the population. Today those numbers aren't very different. And in fact, Americans have consistently overestimated the percentage of Black people in the US, in part due to media representations. [2]

None of this means that Hollywood is/was not racist, but the problem of media representation is different from how it is usually presented. For example, Black actors have difficulty being cast as villains, because there's a longstanding fear in Hollywood about how that would look. [3]

[1] https://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1991-02.pdf

[2] https://news.gallup.com/poll/4435/public-overestimates-us-bl...

[3] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/kumail-n...

This is all true until you 30-something. You won't believe how your family culture and values kicks in when you become full-scale adult with non-delegateable responsibilities and other adult-life quirks. And then a midlife crisis punches you in the head. Just wait, the interesting times are ahead)

You actually explained the need for DEI.

>Yet if some HR person would interview me, a white-skinned guy, and then my best friend, a black-skinned guy who has African/Japanese ancestry, I'd definitely be placed in the same "bucket" as the white Dutchies around me and my friend with the black Dutchies, despite him and I actually having identical experiences and mindsets and not really having anything in common with the Dutchies.

If they're putting you two in different buckets, how likely is it that it's to do something with one bucket and something else with the other? I imagine that, on average, the white-people-who-have-nothing-to-do-with-each-other bucket is going to fare better than the black-people-who-have-nothing-to-do-with-each-other bucket.

DEI is meant to counteract that. It's concerned with the initial surface-level nonsense because the initial surface-level nonsense, driven by socioeconomic and political structures and implicit bias, is what keeps HR et al. from being able to reach deeper and make conscientious calls vis a vis diversity of thought.

Why not measure on diversity of thought then?

That's the goal. But you can't get there, under our current system and circumstances, without some DEI-like anti-filter. It's not either-or; "Measure diversity of thought," is step #2, after, "Counteract the social gravity of tribalism in its myriad forms."

Because measuring diversity of thought is much more difficult, and thought isn't a legally protected class.

> thought isn't a legally protected

So the law justifies the law?

All I meant was that all companies ultimately care about is what is legally required, everything else ends up just being lip service and PR.

To your question though, the law justifies the law unfortunately. That's one big reason I'm opposed to laws and government in general. Something is legal because we said its legal, or more often its legal because a prior generation said it was legal. Put worse, something is punishable because we once wrote down that you would be punished for a specific act.