DEI is racist and sexist, and I'm tired of pretending like it's not.
If we aren't hiring and firing based on competence and merit, then we have completely lost the plot. Here's why:
Yesterday I touched on the pernicious practice of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) hiring quotas when discussing all the many reasons Donald Trump’s security detail screwed up and let him get shot in Butler PA a week and a half ago.
DEI really is poison. It’s one of the dumbest and destructive mind-viruses we’ve ever been infected with as a civilization. If you’re making your hiring/firing decisions on the basis of anything other than competence and merit and your perception of how this hire/fire helps the bottom line, you are lost.
Amusingly, in the confusion that is Biden’s (willing?) concession that he’s not going to continue running for a second term, his “successor” Kamala Harris is being mocked and attacked for being a “diversity hire”. And boy, is the left mad about it. “How dare you!”, they cry, “She’s tremendously capable!”
Ha.
Even setting aside the zillions of examples of her weird and cackly incompetence, she’s obviously a diversity hire. That was the extremely well-advertised point all along.
Joe Biden went out of his way to promise that he wouldn’t pick the best vice presidential candidate he could find. He said he’s pick a woman of color. That’s the very definition of a diversity hire.
And from the left’s perspective, isn’t that a wonderful thing? Isn’t that something to be proud of? Shouldn’t they be leaning into how amazing it is that Biden ignored merit and skill and intentionally shrunk the pool of possible VPs down to a single digit percentage of the population when making such an important pick?
It sucks that they/we had to suffer through four years with another old white guy as president, but now we get the payoff! A DEI president! Yay!
The only thing better would have been if Biden had insisted that his VP be homosexual and crippled as well. Think of the diversity gains!
Seriously, though. DEI really does poison everything. It’s horrible for everybody, including those hired under such a quota system. Once you’ve announced that your hiring policy isn’t merit-based, then everyone will assume that every “diverse” person in your organization wasn’t good enough to be hired under a merit-based system.
For example, back in the day, before racial and sex-based hiring quotas, if you saw that a member of some “diverse” group was going to be the pilot of the plane you were flying on, your natural thought would be that this person must be exceptionally talented.
Why? Because even though our society (like every society) has unfortunate prejudices and stereotypical attitudes, this person was so talented that they got hired anyway. “Good for them!”, you might think as you confidently settled into your seat.
But if you know that the airline you are flying on has embraced DEI in a big way and you see some non-white male going into the cockpit, now what? You know they didn’t have to have aced all the qualifications to get hired. So, now how do you feel?
Maybe like white-knuckling it for the whole flight?
But let’s give the devil his due. There was a reason that people clamored for laws that mandate racial and sex-based quotas. There was a problem they were trying to solve. They just chose a solution that was worse than the original problem.
It’s not healthy for an organization (or a society) to intentionally or reflexively not hire or promote people who are “diverse”. Doing so is unfair. Even worse, you deprive your organization of access to talented people.
It’s dumb and wrong to not hire based on race and sex. You should hire on merit.
But it’s equally dumb and wrong to insist on hiring based on race and sex. Again, you should hire on merit.
Proponents of DEI make the stupid mistake of not realizing that DEI is exactly as racist and sexist as the policies they are trying to “fix”.
In other words, you can’t solve the problem of racism and sexism by being racist and sexist.
But I’ll throw “the other side” another bone. There are situations where having a “diverse” group of employees can be a good thing for the bottom line in and of itself, for reasons of synergy, or connection with a particular market segment, or a bunch of other reasons.
But it’s critically important to have an excellent “bottom line” reason for being diverse. If you are doing so for any other reason — if you are intentionally not hiring the most capable person for the sake of diversity — then you are screwing up.
Oh, and you’re being exactly the kind of racist and/or sexist that you probably hold in contempt. So, ya know… stop it.
Naturally,
Adam
Got a racist or sexist hankering to learn more about “the good old days”? Well, as the poet William Joel says, they “weren’t all that good, and tomorrow ain’t as bad as it seems.”
Regardless, you can take a tour around the history of our country and our civilization — and learn some economics and philosophy too — by checking out Tom Woods’s Liberty Classroom. I like it. I bet you’ll like it, too!
There's a school of thought that if the job is so hard that only a few people can perform it, then you must alter the expectation. Much like Ford was able to dumb down assembly of complex automobiles to simple tasks done by individuals, complicated "brain work" must be subdivided into simple tasks (that might someday be performed by AI) so that anyone can perform the task.
Never mind that it is far less efficient, productive or fulfilling. As long as the "average" or slightly below can perform the task, that's all that matters. Slap a warm body with a pulse in that cubical and if they screw up, well, that means your management skills are lacking. And if your management skills are bad, what's that say about the whole chain of command? That's the fundamental argument for DEI.
We we’re supposed to have 30 years of it then affirmative action was going to fix everything. We would all have equalized it all out and then we could move forward having all of us on equal footing. I remember that from the 60s.