If you want to account for privilege, that's fine. But there are much better proxies than "skin color". For example, if you want to reduce poverty, why write a

If you want to account for privilege, that's fine. But there are much better proxies than "skin color". For example, if you want to reduce poverty, why write a check to people of a certain race (on the basis that people of that race are more likely to be poor) rather than just writing a check to poor people directly? The problem is that people are obsessed with the median person of a given race (and how these "median people" compare with each other) that they project these median personas onto individuals. In other words, they treat individuals as fungible tokens of their race. It doesn't matter if a black candidate has had an easy suburban life and a white candidate grew up in poverty, the DEI lens just sees a black candidate and a white candidate, and the perennial social imperative to bring the median black person and the median white person closer to parity.