this post was submitted on 06 May 2024

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DEI Debate

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A place to share your thoughts on DEI policy in corporate America, Academia and in Western society at large. I started this blog on Lemmy after a moderator at HackerNews came into a comment section and reprimanded posters for sharing their own experiences with DEI enforcers at their workforce.

This post was partiuclarly informative as a poster explained a negative experience he had at Dropbox. However, the moderator did not like the tone of the thread and decided to shut it down.

I found that to be an anti-free speech position as this comment section was nothing but respectable. This led me to ask, where can we actually talk about DEI issues and their impact on our career progression and free speech rights? Certainly not on HackerNews, certainly not on Reddit.

So I am going to try to make this community a place where we can host productive debate and actually discuss these issues in a polite and civil manner. YOUR experience matters and I'd love for you to share it!

founded 7 months ago

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uglybaldmofo

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What are your thoughts on DEI? (self.debate_dei)

submitted 7 months ago by uglybaldmofo to c/debate_dei

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I would love to hear your experiences and your thoughts on this topic. If you have pro-DEI or anti-DEI positions, I will read them, consider them and respect your right to your own opinion.

My position is that I'm anti-DEI as I consider it a form of discrimination against white males and also consider it very deceptive. I'm open to discussing it!

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[+] runswithjedi 14 points 7 months ago (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] themeatbridge 10 points 7 months ago (1 children)

When you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression.

[–] uglybaldmofo -1 points 7 months ago (3 children)

To say that it's equality is actually funny to me, considering that to get into a certain university in my state the white applicants need SAT scores that are 200 points higher than the black applicants. That involves a lot of extra study and even a certain lifestyle. And this is the major issue that I have with DEI -- it's like giving an honorary degree to a 'diverse' candidate, then putting pressure on a company to hire this candidate, and then inventing a position for this candidate, and then promoting this candidate to a leadership position.

That is not 'equality'. To have someone who comes into a tech position with no relevant experience and no relevant knowledge, because she has a vagina or has black skin, is the opposite of equality

[–] jeffw 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Source on your claim about SAT scores?

[–] themeatbridge 3 points 7 months ago

That's quite an impressive strawman you've constructed in your mind, there.

[–] VonCesaw 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Long and short of it is

Black people move from the South to Northern cities during Jim Crow/already lived in the area with the densest population (because everyone did) >

White people move away from cities (including those in the north) during desegregation (some suburbs still have bylaws that forbid nonwhites from living there!), but still opt to work in said cities >

Schools are established in the newly built suburb communities that are paid for by suburb's homeowner taxes >

The people left to pick up the tax burden for the schools are those that remained in the cities >

Schools become hilariously defunded that you can actually measure someone's potential income by their ZIP code >

Measures were put in place so that those from these schools might actually have a shot at getting into college, because underfunded schools dont exactly lead to competitive college candidates >

Around the mid-2000s a bunch of conservatives and radio shock jocks pushed the narrative that "they are forcing white people out of college/[insert skilled field here]" which evolved to "white people are at a disadvantage when getting into college/[insert skilled field here]" which evolved to "they are letting 'non-qualified' people get into college/[insert skilled field here]"

[–] uglybaldmofo 0 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Lol. Did you not follow the recent Supreme Court case dealing with race based admissions at universities? The bias that administrators were showing in favor of URMs was extreme

One reason why I made this community is because on a GRE subreddit, the mod would actually lock threads that even talked about how URMs can get accepted into graduate programs with low scores compared to whites and Asians

So I will give you credit for explaining everything in a step by step fashion, but it's a fact that university administrators were weighting candidates based on race, which, thankfully, was recently made illegal.

I also would like to point out that I haven't attacked you for your position, yet if I were to explain my own anti dei position, I'm at risk of being fired from my job, doxxed, etc. So the spirit of free speech is essentially dead when it comes to anything surrounding "people of color" or any other group that gets to claim oppression in order to get money and preferential treatment

[–] VonCesaw 1 points 7 months ago

If they didn't force a requirement, Unis would "only take the most qualified candidates", which over 90%+ of the time would bar Black and Hispanic non-athletes because it so happens that they didn't have the generational wealth required to have both a stable home environment and access to good schooling, meanwhile the white students with parents and grandparents who got access to extremely affordable property investments can coast right into college

[–] uglybaldmofo -2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

So, I would like to share an experience from my job that has various 'affinity groups' for EVERYONE except white males. We have affinity groups for Arabs, African Americans, Asians, Latino's, Women, LGBTQ, etc, but none for white males.

This is rather discriminatory because the leadership at our site, as per one of our HR representatives, is 50% 'non-white' and I would say that for the non-leadership portion of the company, it's about 40% white, with probably 60% being women. My point being, there's not really that many white males in this building, especially in non-leadership positions.

I'm somewhat offended by this considering that at these affinity group meetings, leadership interacts with employees and tells them ways to get promoted, etc. It's quite discriminatory, IMO.

[–] uglybaldmofo -2 points 7 months ago

I would tend to agree with you.

[–] Boinkage 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Tell me you don't understand institutional racism without telling me you don't understand institutional racism.

[–] uglybaldmofo 0 points 7 months ago

I think you and many others make the mistake of thinking that if group A and group B differ in outcomes and success, group B must be striving to keep down group A. What you don't consider is that different races and people in different subcultures exhibit massively different behaviors.

The problem is that we can't talk about this anywhere without being threatened by HR or even threatened to be banned from certain social media sites.

So there's really almost nothing we can do about this until your side admits that you're anti-free speech and anti-free inquiry, even at the highest academic levels. If you can admit that then we could actually start listing behavioral differences between African Americans and Whites or Asians, and then perhaps start really figuring out how to approach this problem of 'inequity'

[–] blahsay 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

There's better options for helping the disadvantaged than resorting to racism.

Rather than hold up a color chart why not judge based on economic factors? A person's income,parental income, education level, tax returns etc are far more accurate indicators.

Dei is institutional racism and ugly as hell.

[–] Mickey7 2 points 7 months ago

**"why not judge based on economic factors" **- completely agree with this. Judging by the tint of your skin is insane. But as an employer I would give more value to someone who succeeded coming from a poor economic situation over someone who did not. Everything is equal but one started working part time during school at 14, working full time in the summers, vs. a kid who never had or needed a job during their years in school. I'll hire the kid who started working at 14