> The only thing that matters is if someone can do a job - period!

That's an absurd lie. People convicted of sex crimes shouldn't have jobs with children. Foreign nationals shouldn't have top security or intelligence jobs. People with a record of substance abuse shouldn't operate heavy machinery. And so on an so forth... I'm boring myself with how obvious this all is.

And maybe, just maybe, extremely powerful jobs that have an outsized influence on our society shouldn't only be offered to straight white men. It's clearly not as obvious of an argument as my previous examples, but it's not absurd either.

It’s not that jobs only go to white men. It’s that you don’t deny a job to a white man (or any other identity group) because they are a white man.

Harvard denied access to Jews for “personality flaws” in the early 1900s, and similarly denied Asians for “personality” reasons up until a couple years ago when the Supreme Court finally declared that illegal.

Racism is still racism, even if you claim to be “correcting” some imagined harm through your racism

Why are you assuming that non-white people cannot have the necessary qualifications? If I didn't know any better, I'd conclude that reasoning is... racist.

The reality is there are more non-white, qualified people than you could possibly hire. The world is overflowing with them.

So if your board is 100% white men, that's really fucking weird. How did that happen?

The elephant in the room here is that white men are SIGNIFICANTLY more likely to be hired due to the color of their skin. Look at Trump's current admin - full of white men who aren't qualified, who are alcoholics, who are patently stupid, and on and on. But if you look at research, too, just having a white name is enough to increase your chance of being hired by 50%.

What’s weird is obsessing over the minute racial details of every person like it’s the antebellum south. The only thing that matters is if someone can do a job - period! Being denied advancement in your career because you don’t have enough drops of black blood, or don’t have enough homosexual sex, is insanely wrong!

> Being denied advancement in your career because you don’t have enough drops of black blood, or don’t have enough homosexual sex, is insanely wrong!

It's a good thing this is something that is not happening, then.

What's happening is you are assuming that black individuals or homosexuals finding success must have been handed something. Which is, obviously, prejudiced. The lede you're burying is that those people were hired because they're qualified.

If you live in a society that mandates DEI, it’s assumed that anyone getting a job via affirmative action is not the most qualified.

If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups (unless you are so racist as to believe they can’t compete on merit)

DEI is not affirmative action.

DEI mostly revolves around programs for outreach, employee resource groups, statements of diversity considerations for research, that kind of thing. The idea that DEI means you have quotas for how many black people you have to hire is just GOP nonsense.

> If you make affirmative action illegal, then of course you will hire a variety of races and identity groups

I mean, not necessarily. Historically, and currently, you're going to end up with a disproportionate amount of white people. Because that's just how the US works - white people are incredibly advantaged so naturally they're going to get more, and better, jobs, in relation to their level of qualification.

Naturally over the past ~80 years it's gotten better. We don't explicitly say "we don't hire black engineers" anymore, so that's great. But you'd be a fool to think this systemic racism just vanishes overnight.

It will takes hundreds, yes hundreds, of years before it is completely eradicated. We live in the shadow of the systems and institutions of our grandparents. Who, might I add, are still alive and still making decisions.