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Yes. What too few people realized was that the rollout of DEI was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that

Yes. What too few people realized was that the rollout of DEI was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant. These programs were never a victory for the principles or the people, they were marketing. So it should come as no shock whatsoever that now that another political group is politically ascendant the marketing that is valuable has changed, so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure. Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. Progressives have forgotten in the last 10-15 years that the progress which we've won took generations not because our predecessors were weak and slow but because it inherently takes generations to effect lasting change. It's a slow, painful process, and if you think you accomplished it in a decade you're almost certainly wrong.

seadan83 2y ago
I agree with most of your points. Though with respect lasting change, where is your impression coming from that the gains are in the last 10 to 15 years? Or even that is a widespread belief? According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. We take for granted perhaps the first black president is _recent_, the first time having two black senators is now, school integration is about 40 years old in some places - not even one lifetime.i don't think it's an accurate characterization that huge strides were made in just the last decade, or that we were even starting at a "good" place. I fundamentally agree on how slow the progress has been. I don't know if it needs to be that slow. I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. Notably because of how little has been done. It's not like we're in that good of a place, never really were. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/meta-ending-dei-program https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/meta-ending-...
- ruined 2y ago
  the last known direct child of an american born into slavery died only a few years ago https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery-link-daniel-smith-dead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery...
  - dkga 2y ago
    Into institutionalised slavery. Sadly slavery still exists, is live and well, and occurs throughout the planet (even rich countries). The difference is that it is not statutory now in most places.
    - wahnfrieden 2y ago
      Slavery is at an all-time high going back thousands of years 2 million institutionalized slaves (per 13th amendment) in the US today, around the same as 1830 USA 50 million worldwide as of a few years ago
      - gizmo686 2y ago
        The 13th amendment allows for slavery as a punishment for crimes. It does not require that everyone in prison be a slave.
        wahnfrieden 2y ago
        Ok?
        PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        Are you actually claiming that everyone in a US prison is a slave?
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        The constitution allows that they be used for slave labor, and many are.
- deleted 2y ago
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- pixxel 2y ago
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  - sanktanglia 2y ago
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    - xwolfi 2y ago
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    - dgfitz 2y ago
      I must be the only idiot to think that education and money aren’t the issue in the black community. Two-parent households and stability would sort a lot of things out in a generation. Dreams, goals, ambitions, and opportunities follow from stability. Money doesn’t fix emotional vacuums. This is not meant to be inflammatory. I’ve had many conversations with black men about this, they actually put the idea in my head.
      - skulk 2y ago
        It's true that having a two-parent household helps children's outcomes, but it's somewhat inflammatory to ignore the impact that targeted violence has had on black communities, or that simply pretending that didn't happen and that "they should just get their shit together" is a remotely compassionate stance. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/us/whitewashing-of-america-racism/ https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/us/whitewashing-...
        dgfitz 2y ago
        It’s inflammatory to assume I intentionally ignore something and accused me of ignoring it. Anything else I missed? Probably a lot, huh.
- lolinder 2y ago
  > I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. I think I may have miscommunicated there—I'm not saying that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the national government for a few years and push a bunch of bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going through the motions of equity and then expect anything you did to stick. I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years ago, but we're nowhere near where we started. Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs.
- xwolfi 2y ago
  But you make a strange comment here: "black and brown" employees are both completely different people. What you should want in priority is to get the descendents of former slaves to have a prominent place in society, include them as equals and make them powerful. I can understand that, they built the US same as the other invaders, and maybe even the natives should be more present in american society. But brown ? Im French, and sadly not brown, I wish I was ofc, but why would an Indian from Calcutta be more "diverse" than me from Normandy ? Skin color is as interesting as hair color, it means nothing. Say "descendent of slaves", Indians and Europeans if you want to rank people by order of priority, maybe ? For me that's why these DEI things are wrong, they're racist in a way. They divide people across skin color boundaries that make no sense.
  - yantramanav 2y ago
    Disenfranchising Indians must be the new racist trend here. Please try to have some empathy. Brown person can be a descendant of the “Coolies” taken as Indentured servants to Fiji, Trinidad, Suriname, Malaysia, SA etc. They could be people from French colonies like Algeria as well. Brown doesn’t only mean an Indian from Calcutta, although they were heavily persecuted until recently (Check Bengal Famine)
    - pfannkuchen 2y ago
      Coolies have nothing to do with America though. If we have solved all of the locally rooted problems already, then sure let’s go ahead and help others too. That isn’t the case though. I think it’s insulting to descendants of American slaves to go from treating them as sub human not long ago straight to putting others’ past hardships at the same level as theirs in America.
    - lmz 2y ago
      How is that a US issue? It's more of an issue for the French or the British.
    - xwolfi 2y ago
      I was simply pointing out an Indian deserve no more advantages than a Turkish or a Portuguese, while a descendent of slave might, since his family was wronged by the initial american invaders and they contributed, sometimes via back-breaking work, to the current state of the country. Indians can go through totally normal immigration and hiring procedures, just like me: they're brown just because of the sun, just like Im white because the weather is shit in Normandy.
- Marazan 2y ago
  > FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12% That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.
  - o0-0o 2y ago
    So, more "black and brown" people (your words not mine), and less, what, White and Yellow and Red people and Purple people? = success? That sounds a bit racist to me, just saying.
    - Drew_ 2y ago
      Achieving representation closer to that of the wider population is not racist.
      - kridsdale1 2y ago
        Which population? FB hires from everywhere in the world and sponsors visas. Having an employee base that’s 30% Chinese and 30% indian should thus be the goal.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        To start with, you can sort the employee records into a visa pile and a not-visa pile.
      - Dalewyn 2y ago
        You are explicitly considering a man's race, that is racism.
        Dylan16807 2y ago
        Are you serious? Measuring something is not discrimination.
        cindycindy 2y ago
- anon373839 2y ago
  > My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.
  - goatlover 2y ago
    Equity instead of equality. Sounded awful close to promoting equal outcomes over equal opportunity. I dont trust people who want to engineer society from the top down to be the result they think is fair and just.
    - treyd 2y ago
      This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes. It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today. It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.
      - marcusverus 2y ago
        > This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes. Could you inform Kamala Harris? She just ran a campaign which was largely predicated on the need for "equity", the goal of which she repeatedly described as meaning we need to take proactive measures to ensure that "we all wind up at the same place". https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1322963321994289154 https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1322963321994289154
        jonathanlb 2y ago
        I think the voters already informed her about that. The campaign was shut down a few months ago.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  Even school integration was largely motivated by red lining and even now by white flight.
  - paulryanrogers 2y ago
    ^mitigated, not motivated
- rayiner 2y ago
  America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery (German, Italian, Irish, etc.) And the non-black non-white people (Asians, Hispanics) didn’t either. So nobody will do anything that costs themselves anything. The best you can hope for is color blindness and a very slow homogenization and equilibrium. There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them. Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
  - KPGv2 2y ago
    > America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on. DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity). But to the dominant group, this feels like oppression, in the same way that feminism feels like man-hatred to many men bc if you have 90% of the pie and there's a trend toward you only having 50% of the pie, you think that's oppression. So I get why you view this as a punishment of your group (which I assume is one of those white groups who "didn't own slaves", never mind that they all benefited from, and still do, the systemic oppression of non-white people in the US). I'm full German American to the extent I'm still the same religion as my ancestors, I still speak German in the home with my kids, etc. But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
    - jazzyjackson 2y ago
- chii 2y ago
  > FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. and yet, why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]? DEI isn't about equity, it's about affirmative action. And i am fundamentally against affirmative action. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
  - KPGv2 2y ago
    > why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]? There's no way this isn't just disingenuousness on your part. Or do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
    - chii 2y ago
      > a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball? no one is depriving anyone's rights to apply and tryout, but there's certainly a lack of affirmative action in these teams. And no one bats an eye about it - it's only natural apparently. So i am asking why is this affirmative action must exist for companies hiring, but not for the NBA?
    - gottorf 2y ago
      > do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball? You can remove white people from the equation entirely, if it makes it easier. Asians comprise 6% of the US population and only 0.2% of the NBA, and it's much the same story in the NFL. Should then therefore be a concerted push to increase the number of Asian players in those leagues?
- deanishe 2y ago
  > According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?
  - Over2Chars 2y ago
    According to this, the groups marked black and hispanic, bachelor's degrees are 27%, but it doesn't say what subject. So, assuming all of them aren't CS, under 27%...? https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72 https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72
- 4dregress 2y ago
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  - 4dregress 2y ago
    I don’t know why I’ve been down voted. Women are woefully represented and under paid in pretty all work forces. The same also applies to people of colour. If the developed west didn’t have an issue with these groups we would have equality, from where I’m sitting things don’t look that equal!
- KPGv2 2y ago
  > FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. That's a 50% increase.
- lazide 2y ago
  The biggest issue for changing percentages like that, is that fundamentally the actual mindset/work required to do software engineering effectively kinda sucks. And often conflicts heavily with the type of life most groups/people want to live, and the type of work most people want to do. Especially historically under represented groups. It doesn’t mean people in any of those groups can’t or won’t be able to do it well. But it does mean, statistically, is there won’t be a lot of them (from a sheer numbers perspective), and if you want a lot of them you’ll need to actively fight significant cultural and personal tendencies for a long period of time. Especially since experienced people take decades to train, and are the result of massive amounts of filtering. Probably not 1 in 200 or fewer new hires will ever end up as an experienced Staff Eng, 1 in 500 as a Senior staff Eng, etc. If you’re a large company, that means you have a huge pipeline problem, if for instance, you need to hit some target number of people with some coarse criteria of color/race/gender/sex, whatever. Because there probably just literally aren’t that many that meet any other criteria you would use. Either because they got filtered out due to some discrimination thing too early on, so never had time to grow to the level you need, or just went ‘meh’ and chose some other different path. But for many years now, the DOL in the US has been requiring large companies to hit mandatory percentages meeting those coarse criteria. For some criteria, decades, but for most less than an decade. And have been enforcing it. So 1) you can only move the needle so far, before every potentially plausible recruit could be hired, if you try to do it right now, and 2) in many cases, the issue is the groups involved just flat out don’t want to do/be that thing enough, for a ton of reasons. One big issue in California in the Latino and Black communities for instance, is investing in schooling is seen as a serious ‘nerd’/uncool thing, same with professional employment. So both those communities have huge issues with grades and education. There are also historic issues with ‘the man’ smacking down members of those groups if they try. East Asians (and US Indians) see education as a competitive necessity, and professional employment as a measure of success - the classic ‘Asian Parents’ trope is very real. They have had issues with ‘the man’, but have managed to mostly sidestep them, and are very highly represented in education and professional employment. To the point they have been actively penalized in many Affirmative Action programs. If it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, you can’t get 10 babies with 10 women in 1 month. Even more so when 9 of them are on birth control.
- torginus 2y ago
  >FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12% That sounds proportional? I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?
- Slava_Propanei 2y ago
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- jsnell 2y ago
  > the first time having two black senators is now This seemed implausible, so I checked. It does not appear to be true. It's been continuously true since 2013, and you currently have five. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_United_States_senators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_Unite...
- justmy2centz 2y ago
  Abysmal? You think that Meta is going to compromise its quality of work to meet a statistic they knew would only be temporary? If they had changed the demographic to 30%+ they would have had to hire subpar people and bypassed people in the top of their field who truly deserved and had the experience to qualify for the job. This whole DEI bs never should have been started. What should have happened is we should have started to support the early childhood development of underprivileged single mothers. And mandated all of them to have home visits to make sure they are being good mothers. The issue with specifically black American culture is one that has to start in early development. Once they have grown up in a broken household they are essentially unsavable at the macro level. You can’t reverse the neglect, trauma and core belief structure once they enter the criminal justice system. And all this DEI bs simply pampers the deluded belief that people are not being treated fairly. People are treated according to how they act and behave. The disproportionate number of black people in jail is not a misalignment of justice. It’s a misalignment with morals and culture.
- nothercastle 2y ago
  Why is that terrible? 14% of the US is black that seems reasonable considering other economical and educational disadvantages black Americas face.
thewanderer1983 2y ago
>so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure. AKA. Cheerleading for the power structures.
diogocp 2y ago
> Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. Exactly. And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Shouting people down and canceling them is never a way to persuade people your cause is just.
  - esafak 2y ago
    The goal is not to persuade them but to sideline them; to prevent them to propagating their viewpoint.
- throwaway48476 2y ago
  >And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days. This is just demonstrably untrue. For nearly a century the Soviet Union succeeded by doing exactly that. They had international support from the progressive types too.
  - davidgay 2y ago
    You're moving the goal posts to try and tar your opponents with the "communist" brush. The Soviet definition of "silencing dissent" was far more extreme and violent (prison, death) than what the grandparent's comment is referring to.
  - jdietrich 2y ago
    Ask anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union about that one. The vast majority of people could see through the propaganda - even supposed party loyalists - but they understood the consequences of failing to toe the line. There wasn't a sudden moment of collective enlightenment that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, just a gradual breaking of a taboo. Imposition of an ideology through coercion is remarkably durable, right until it isn't.
brutal_chaos_ 2y ago
If DEI was only marketing, why has the number and proportion of women in tech been increasing over that time? I'm not trying to challenge you, I'm just curious if you have any insight. ETA: and do you think that number will increase, stagnate, or decrease with DEI gone, and why?
- lolinder 2y ago
  It can be marketing and somewhat effective. I'm not trying to say that it didn't accomplish anything (though others are), I'm suggesting that it wasn't motivated by a sincere desire to accomplish something real for equity. And since the motivation was external pressure, a change in external pressure immediately triggers a pivot.
  - brutal_chaos_ 2y ago
    Oh ok, that makes sense. I can agree with that. Given that, I worry the number of women will stagnate or decrease without it, which, imho, would be a detriment to the industry.
- geoelectric 2y ago
  There’s no reason to believe it’s primarily due to the DEI programs until it gets worse again with them gone. That’s a basic ABA flow for testing causation. Things improve on their own over time too.
  - brutal_chaos_ 2y ago
    This is true. I know the change wasn't just DEI, but I thought it might have been the biggest push. And yeah, after it's gone we will see how much it helped (or not), or other influences will muddy the data and we'll never really know (unless it's a really big trend). shrug
    - snovv_crash 2y ago
      Honestly I think a lot more of it has to do with the perceived status of engineers in society - particularly teenage girls are hyper aware of social status. 15 years ago in any movie a software engineer was considered the biggest loser ever, ridiculed, and unattractive. I think if I had to choose any single thing that increased female participation in engineering the most, it was the Iron Man movies, which showed a vision of high social status in an engineer and started to break the stereotypes.
dukeofdoom 2y ago
I remember watching some event around CHAD time, where white social justice warriors on stage where making lots of social justice outrage statements, on behalf of Native Americans, in front on this native America elder. Only to have him take the microphone after them, and he was having none of it, he went up to the mic and completely denigrated them. Then it dawned on me, that these white people where literally ruining his cause by trying to take it over. And there's long history of white people doing this, where they subvert and neuter a movement and insert themselves as leaders, but only temper the cause. The end result is a kind of moderation, where no effective change happens because of it. I guess I read a similar sentiment once, where Anarchists where claiming that it was them that changed course of human history, repeatedly, by throwing the wrench in the wheels of society, to cause the change. From that point of view, it would get annoying if there was someone taking the wrench out before the fall.
aprilthird2021 2y ago
This is true, and unfortunately you can't say this to any colleagues at any of these companies without jeopardizing your future. Even still as the DEI programs are dying, the DEI social norms are still strong in most corporations
zmgsabst 2y ago
There hasn’t been a decade in the past 130 years of their existence that Progressives haven’t advocated for systemic racism. We have dozens of programs that were later legislated against or later ruled illegal by courts. There was no time Progressives were against racism. Notable black leaders like Malcolm X correctly pointed out that white Progressives never supported black people — but were appropriating their voices as a cudgel against other white people, eg in an internal power struggle of the Democratic Party where the northern Progressive faction drove out the Dixiecrats. 2025 is the year that Progressives need to accept their perennial racism is no longer acceptable, even if they appropriate the language of civil rights to justify their continued bigotry.
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  This is pretty spot-on. Whether they’re aware of it or not, most white liberals are motivated not by a desire to lift nonwhites up but rather by a desire to push “white trash” down.
unclebucknasty 2y ago
I think your analysis is missing some nuance. There are countless instances throughout history of lasting change being sparked by a single moment. Sure, that moment is frequently the culmination of some period of struggle, but you have to remember that the issues that came to a head and sparked those DEI initiatives a few years ago were exactly that—the product of literally centuries of struggle. Or, perhaps more accurately, a recent phase of that struggle. So, I believe your emphasis is on the wrong side of the equation here. That is, it's not that there is an inherent deficiency in a trending moment or ascendant party giving rise to change. It's the explicit pushback against DEI that is responsible for its unwinding. And, this effort was not successful because the party that sponsored the pushback was ascendant. Instead, part of the party's ascension was due to it making an issue of the pushback. More specifically, the blowback was part of a divisive theme, along with illegal immigration and other issues. Progress is not a one-way street and gains are not de facto insulated against erosion. Progress (and its security) is a product of the mores and culture of a time, and these can be influenced and manipulated. So, there is really not such a thing as "lasting change", and that's what we saw here. In some ways, the blowback has taken us not just back to our pre-DEI state, but to a pre-1960s mental footing.
- lolinder 2y ago
  The methods chosen to push this and other recent changes assumed that those advocating change would stay in power, if not in government at least in the culture. They assumed that they could keep up the pressure to act in a particular way in spite of the fact that those so pressured didn't really believe in any of it. That was a critical and fatal flaw. You can't plan change on the assumption that you'll be able to apply pressure indefinitely. You're right that there are tipping points, but they don't come at will, they come when the culture is ready for them. Push too soon, and as you note, you may actually undo progress that had already been truly won. Culture behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid: manipulate it gently and it flows smoothly. Apply too much stress too fast, and it turns into a solid and resists you. Trump did not invent that resistance, he simply untapped it and rode it to power. The progressive movement created the resistance by applying too much pressure to a culture that wasn't ready.
  - 2y ago
makeitdouble 2y ago
> Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. I'm trying to put in flat terms, but fundamentally power matters. This is the base of democracy: give people the power to change things, there needs to be a fear that these people will exercise their power. Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime. And also people are way more influenced by their everyday environments than nice speeches. Having a nation that values diversity helps more to also embrace these ideals, than living in a racist dictatorship and fighting at every corner to keep your minority voices in your heart. > It's a slow, painful process The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger. Women lost abortion rights over a few weeks (the leading to that was also long and slow, but when it finally happens it doesn't take much). Foreign people lost the right to return to their US home within days when the ban happened last time. Power matters.
- lazide 2y ago
  The issue here is that power not exercised is power lost, and power fundamentally comes down to either perceived or actual consequences. All people have some degree of racist tendencies - regardless of gender, sex, color, etc. And criminal tendencies. And other tendencies. And what actual consequences will be applied that impact one group or another tend to go in cycles/pendulum back and forth (and hence impact what percent of the population is going to do x, and how many will see real consequences for those actions). That is because when one group overdoes it (or is perceived to), enough people get tired of that group/outraged, and then things shift. And these patterns tend to be on coarse criteria like gender/sex/color/race/language, etc. because the most brazen users of any sort of shitty force/violence/shaming/whatever are exactly the type of people who are the shittiest. And every group of people have a percent that is shitty. For instance, for many years now shame has been a major consequence, along with legal action. So eventually, we end up with a group/leader essentially immune to shame and legal action, who is now going to use do all sorts of shameless and illegal things. Really, a large group of people like that. And who don’t mind violence (or the threat of it) as a potential consequence. Eventually, being a shameless crook will fall out of fashion (or will have finally hurt/pissed off enough people), and another counter group will rise to take it’s place. Often, when it gets particularly ugly/strong in one direction or another, there is also a corresponding backlash against the particularly strong users of the prior ‘fashion’ of power. Sometimes beheadings, or ostracizing, or legal harassment, or whatever. Weinstein getting what he got (as deserved as it was), was one swing. We’ll see who gets this next counter reaction. Why do you think the dems and tech companies are going out of their way to be as friendly to the incoming admin as they are? They know the score, and are trying to avoid getting whacked. Or, to quote an old western - ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it’.
Simon_O_Rourke 2y ago
> ...was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant. Of course it was, and so is this latest effort from Meta. I'm sure if there was some anti-Brazilian group in power in Washington or something, you'd see Meta shutting down their offices in Rio.
mise_en_place 2y ago
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- preciousoo 2y ago
  H1 Visa has existed since 1952. The 65,000 per year cap (H1B) has existed since 1990. The 20,000 quota for Masters/PhD holders has existed since 2004. What in the world are you talking about?
torginus 2y ago
I've always found these loud DEI programs incredibly uncanny - every career website loudly how important diversity and inclusiveness is for them, but in flowery language, as implying they'd actually discriminate against non-diverse hires would be illegal in most places. Which begs the question of the point of these programs, considering of why they were needed this outwards messaging against discrimination, considering it was illegal in the first place. I've witnessed the DEI transformation from the inside - which amounted to a chief diversity officer being hired, a lot of incredibly sanctimonious online trainings got scheduled for us, and rainbow flags started popping up in the weirdest places. A few coworkers I had, who checked a lot of the boxes got dragged into interviews and company events (which some found somewhat uncomfortable). Very little changed in practice, and if you didn't care to read the company newsletter (who does that anyway), then you didn't experience much of it.
steveBK123 2y ago
Largely agreed DEI was a bit of a workplace recruiting marketing/signaling exercise than something that changed demographics at work. I've worked in Wall Street tech for 20 years, and while the demographics of my coworkers have changed, it largely had nothing to do with DEI or other recruitment efforts. In the late 90s/early 00s it was FSU Russians&Ukrainians living in South Brooklyn & US born and/or raised Cantonese speaking Chinese from downtown. By late 00s, percent of Indians started to tick upwards. In 2010s, mainland Chinese students on visas ticked way up, and in 2020s one of the fastest growing groups was actually female mainland Chinese students. Campus recruiting may pat themselves on the back about finally growing the % of women, but this was largely downstream of enrollment & degree choices made by these women many years before. In many ways it's gotten a lot better as all these different groups largely work wherever in the organization. 15-20 years ago there was a big problem with the Indian UI guy loading his team with Indians, the Chinese data guy loading his team with Chinese, and the Russian backend lead hiring all Russians. You could guess what team people were on by their face, and they'd often slip into their native languages at work. Not the best for collaboration. Also agree that real change of hearts & minds is slow going over generations, and can't be legislated. That said we have made and continue to make a lot of progress. Anyone who has been alive more than 20 years should be able to recognize US culture in 2020s is so different than even 2008, 1999, 1990, or the 1980s.. I think some people mix 1) cultural change (acceptable words people use / ok jokes people make) with 2) legal changes (gay marriage rights / expanded legal protections from discrimination) and finally 3) outcome changes (higher % of group going to college / lower % of group being poor / etc). 1 moves faster than 2 which moves faster than 3. I think that's because each is downstream of the preceding change. You can't directly change outcomes in a short time span.
valval 2y ago
Worth noting that the exact same applies for environment friendliness, sustainability, pride month, etc.

seadan83 2y ago

I agree with most of your points. Though with respect lasting change, where is your impression coming from that the gains are in the last 10 to 15 years? Or even that is a widespread belief? According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. We take for granted perhaps the first black president is _recent_, the first time having two black senators is now, school integration is about 40 years old in some places - not even one lifetime.i don't think it's an accurate characterization that huge strides were made in just the last decade, or that we were even starting at a "good" place. I fundamentally agree on how slow the progress has been. I don't know if it needs to be that slow. I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. Notably because of how little has been done. It's not like we're in that good of a place, never really were. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/meta-ending-dei-program https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/10/meta-ending-...

ruined 2y ago
the last known direct child of an american born into slavery died only a few years ago https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery-link-daniel-smith-dead/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/10/20/slavery...
- dkga 2y ago
  Into institutionalised slavery. Sadly slavery still exists, is live and well, and occurs throughout the planet (even rich countries). The difference is that it is not statutory now in most places.
  - wahnfrieden 2y ago
    Slavery is at an all-time high going back thousands of years 2 million institutionalized slaves (per 13th amendment) in the US today, around the same as 1830 USA 50 million worldwide as of a few years ago
    - gizmo686 2y ago
      The 13th amendment allows for slavery as a punishment for crimes. It does not require that everyone in prison be a slave.
      - wahnfrieden 2y ago
        Ok?
        PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        Are you actually claiming that everyone in a US prison is a slave?
        BriggyDwiggs42 2y ago
        The constitution allows that they be used for slave labor, and many are.
deleted 2y ago
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pixxel 2y ago
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- sanktanglia 2y ago
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  - xwolfi 2y ago
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  - dgfitz 2y ago
    I must be the only idiot to think that education and money aren’t the issue in the black community. Two-parent households and stability would sort a lot of things out in a generation. Dreams, goals, ambitions, and opportunities follow from stability. Money doesn’t fix emotional vacuums. This is not meant to be inflammatory. I’ve had many conversations with black men about this, they actually put the idea in my head.
    - skulk 2y ago
      It's true that having a two-parent household helps children's outcomes, but it's somewhat inflammatory to ignore the impact that targeted violence has had on black communities, or that simply pretending that didn't happen and that "they should just get their shit together" is a remotely compassionate stance. https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/us/whitewashing-of-america-racism/ https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2021/05/us/whitewashing-...
      - dgfitz 2y ago
        It’s inflammatory to assume I intentionally ignore something and accused me of ignoring it. Anything else I missed? Probably a lot, huh.
lolinder 2y ago
> I disagree that there is a wide held belief that everything was done in the last decade. I think I may have miscommunicated there—I'm not saying that anyone believes that we made all of the progress of the last 150+ years in this past decade. I'm saying that in this past decade progressives have forgotten that it takes generations to make even small changes. You can't hold the national government for a few years and push a bunch of bills through and coerce a bunch of companies into going through the motions of equity and then expect anything you did to stick. I think where we do disagree is that I do believe real progress has been made over the last 160 years. Yes, we're still working towards the goals that were defined 160 years ago, but we're nowhere near where we started. Change like this has to happen on the scale of generations because people ossify and you frankly have to wait for them to pass on. Your only choices are to gradually change the culture as generations roll over or to undo democracy itself. You can't have both a democracy and rapid social change to your preferred specs.
xwolfi 2y ago
But you make a strange comment here: "black and brown" employees are both completely different people. What you should want in priority is to get the descendents of former slaves to have a prominent place in society, include them as equals and make them powerful. I can understand that, they built the US same as the other invaders, and maybe even the natives should be more present in american society. But brown ? Im French, and sadly not brown, I wish I was ofc, but why would an Indian from Calcutta be more "diverse" than me from Normandy ? Skin color is as interesting as hair color, it means nothing. Say "descendent of slaves", Indians and Europeans if you want to rank people by order of priority, maybe ? For me that's why these DEI things are wrong, they're racist in a way. They divide people across skin color boundaries that make no sense.
- yantramanav 2y ago
  Disenfranchising Indians must be the new racist trend here. Please try to have some empathy. Brown person can be a descendant of the “Coolies” taken as Indentured servants to Fiji, Trinidad, Suriname, Malaysia, SA etc. They could be people from French colonies like Algeria as well. Brown doesn’t only mean an Indian from Calcutta, although they were heavily persecuted until recently (Check Bengal Famine)
  - pfannkuchen 2y ago
    Coolies have nothing to do with America though. If we have solved all of the locally rooted problems already, then sure let’s go ahead and help others too. That isn’t the case though. I think it’s insulting to descendants of American slaves to go from treating them as sub human not long ago straight to putting others’ past hardships at the same level as theirs in America.
  - lmz 2y ago
    How is that a US issue? It's more of an issue for the French or the British.
  - xwolfi 2y ago
    I was simply pointing out an Indian deserve no more advantages than a Turkish or a Portuguese, while a descendent of slave might, since his family was wronged by the initial american invaders and they contributed, sometimes via back-breaking work, to the current state of the country. Indians can go through totally normal immigration and hiring procedures, just like me: they're brown just because of the sun, just like Im white because the weather is shit in Normandy.
Marazan 2y ago
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12% That's a 50% increase. Seems pretty successful to me.
- o0-0o 2y ago
  So, more "black and brown" people (your words not mine), and less, what, White and Yellow and Red people and Purple people? = success? That sounds a bit racist to me, just saying.
  - Drew_ 2y ago
    Achieving representation closer to that of the wider population is not racist.
    - kridsdale1 2y ago
      Which population? FB hires from everywhere in the world and sponsors visas. Having an employee base that’s 30% Chinese and 30% indian should thus be the goal.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        To start with, you can sort the employee records into a visa pile and a not-visa pile.
    - Dalewyn 2y ago
      You are explicitly considering a man's race, that is racism.
      - Dylan16807 2y ago
        Are you serious? Measuring something is not discrimination.
        cindycindy 2y ago
anon373839 2y ago
> My perspective, US society is still fighting for gains that _started_ 160 years ago. Still painstakingly slow. I feel this comment won’t win me many friends, but since no one has mentioned it: one of the striking features of the DEI/social justice movement was its rejection of MLK-style racial equality ideals. An entirely new language was invented to describe the new philosophy. And in some circles, if you appealed to MLK’s of vision equality you were ostracized.
- goatlover 2y ago
  Equity instead of equality. Sounded awful close to promoting equal outcomes over equal opportunity. I dont trust people who want to engineer society from the top down to be the result they think is fair and just.
  - treyd 2y ago
    This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes. It's about recognizing that some people have potential that they wouldn't be able to realize due to longstanding historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race and working to account for historial injustices that still impact people today. It's not anyone's fault that these issues exist today, but it's our responsibility as a civilized society to at least ensure we don't actively perpetuate them.
    - marcusverus 2y ago
      > This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes. Could you inform Kamala Harris? She just ran a campaign which was largely predicated on the need for "equity", the goal of which she repeatedly described as meaning we need to take proactive measures to ensure that "we all wind up at the same place". https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1322963321994289154 https://x.com/KamalaHarris/status/1322963321994289154
      - jonathanlb 2y ago
        I think the voters already informed her about that. The campaign was shut down a few months ago.
paulryanrogers 2y ago
Even school integration was largely motivated by red lining and even now by white flight.
- paulryanrogers 2y ago
  ^mitigated, not motivated
rayiner 2y ago
America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery (German, Italian, Irish, etc.) And the non-black non-white people (Asians, Hispanics) didn’t either. So nobody will do anything that costs themselves anything. The best you can hope for is color blindness and a very slow homogenization and equilibrium. There was a gambit to achieve change by getting the non-black non-whites to identify with black people, but it looks like that is going to fail. As you would expect. The income mobility of a Guatemalan immigrant today is similar to that of Polish or Italian immigrants a century ago, and German immigrants 150 year ago. The folks who hit economic parity with whites when their grandparents who are still alive came here in poverty aren’t going to be easily persuaded that they need to upend a system that works well for them. Indeed, in that environment, the longer you keep the concept of “race” alive, the worse things will be. You’re never going to use the concept of race to undo past harms; so it’ll only be used to stir up resentment and disharmony.
- KPGv2 2y ago
  > America is a country where the majority even of “white” people belong to ethnic groups that never had anything to do with African American slavery You're framing DEI as a punishment for slavery, which it's not. White people aren't being punished. That's not the correct framing. That's a self-centered misinterpretation of what's going on. DEI programs are meant to correct for generations of injustice and to push for equity). But to the dominant group, this feels like oppression, in the same way that feminism feels like man-hatred to many men bc if you have 90% of the pie and there's a trend toward you only having 50% of the pie, you think that's oppression. So I get why you view this as a punishment of your group (which I assume is one of those white groups who "didn't own slaves", never mind that they all benefited from, and still do, the systemic oppression of non-white people in the US). I'm full German American to the extent I'm still the same religion as my ancestors, I still speak German in the home with my kids, etc. But it's plain to me how much I benefit from being white even though my ancestors didn't own slaves and were, in fact, opposed to slavery.
  - jazzyjackson 2y ago
chii 2y ago
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. and yet, why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]? DEI isn't about equity, it's about affirmative action. And i am fundamentally against affirmative action. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_NBA
- KPGv2 2y ago
  > why isn't this same standard applied to, for example, NBA players[0]? There's no way this isn't just disingenuousness on your part. Or do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball?
  - chii 2y ago
    > a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball? no one is depriving anyone's rights to apply and tryout, but there's certainly a lack of affirmative action in these teams. And no one bats an eye about it - it's only natural apparently. So i am asking why is this affirmative action must exist for companies hiring, but not for the NBA?
  - gottorf 2y ago
    > do you really think there has been a historical, society-wide attempt to deprive white people of the right to play basketball? You can remove white people from the equation entirely, if it makes it easier. Asians comprise 6% of the US population and only 0.2% of the NBA, and it's much the same story in the NFL. Should then therefore be a concerted push to increase the number of Asian players in those leagues?
deanishe 2y ago
> According to reporting at the guardian [1], FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. Abysmal based on what? What % of CS graduates are brown/black to begin with?
- Over2Chars 2y ago
  According to this, the groups marked black and hispanic, bachelor's degrees are 27%, but it doesn't say what subject. So, assuming all of them aren't CS, under 27%...? https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72 https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72
4dregress 2y ago
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- 4dregress 2y ago
  I don’t know why I’ve been down voted. Women are woefully represented and under paid in pretty all work forces. The same also applies to people of colour. If the developed west didn’t have an issue with these groups we would have equality, from where I’m sitting things don’t look that equal!
KPGv2 2y ago
> FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12%. Seems abysmal. That's a 50% increase.
lazide 2y ago
The biggest issue for changing percentages like that, is that fundamentally the actual mindset/work required to do software engineering effectively kinda sucks. And often conflicts heavily with the type of life most groups/people want to live, and the type of work most people want to do. Especially historically under represented groups. It doesn’t mean people in any of those groups can’t or won’t be able to do it well. But it does mean, statistically, is there won’t be a lot of them (from a sheer numbers perspective), and if you want a lot of them you’ll need to actively fight significant cultural and personal tendencies for a long period of time. Especially since experienced people take decades to train, and are the result of massive amounts of filtering. Probably not 1 in 200 or fewer new hires will ever end up as an experienced Staff Eng, 1 in 500 as a Senior staff Eng, etc. If you’re a large company, that means you have a huge pipeline problem, if for instance, you need to hit some target number of people with some coarse criteria of color/race/gender/sex, whatever. Because there probably just literally aren’t that many that meet any other criteria you would use. Either because they got filtered out due to some discrimination thing too early on, so never had time to grow to the level you need, or just went ‘meh’ and chose some other different path. But for many years now, the DOL in the US has been requiring large companies to hit mandatory percentages meeting those coarse criteria. For some criteria, decades, but for most less than an decade. And have been enforcing it. So 1) you can only move the needle so far, before every potentially plausible recruit could be hired, if you try to do it right now, and 2) in many cases, the issue is the groups involved just flat out don’t want to do/be that thing enough, for a ton of reasons. One big issue in California in the Latino and Black communities for instance, is investing in schooling is seen as a serious ‘nerd’/uncool thing, same with professional employment. So both those communities have huge issues with grades and education. There are also historic issues with ‘the man’ smacking down members of those groups if they try. East Asians (and US Indians) see education as a competitive necessity, and professional employment as a measure of success - the classic ‘Asian Parents’ trope is very real. They have had issues with ‘the man’, but have managed to mostly sidestep them, and are very highly represented in education and professional employment. To the point they have been actively penalized in many Affirmative Action programs. If it takes one woman 9 months to make a baby, you can’t get 10 babies with 10 women in 1 month. Even more so when 9 of them are on birth control.
torginus 2y ago
>FBs DEI program increased black and brown employees from 8% to 12% That sounds proportional? I don't have access to these stats but considering the US black population is 13.7%, and certain academically accomplished groups, such as Asians are overrepresented, having a mostly non-immigrant population be 90% as represented as they are in society, is fine I think?
Slava_Propanei 2y ago
[dead]
jsnell 2y ago
> the first time having two black senators is now This seemed implausible, so I checked. It does not appear to be true. It's been continuously true since 2013, and you currently have five. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_United_States_senators https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African-American_Unite...
justmy2centz 2y ago
Abysmal? You think that Meta is going to compromise its quality of work to meet a statistic they knew would only be temporary? If they had changed the demographic to 30%+ they would have had to hire subpar people and bypassed people in the top of their field who truly deserved and had the experience to qualify for the job. This whole DEI bs never should have been started. What should have happened is we should have started to support the early childhood development of underprivileged single mothers. And mandated all of them to have home visits to make sure they are being good mothers. The issue with specifically black American culture is one that has to start in early development. Once they have grown up in a broken household they are essentially unsavable at the macro level. You can’t reverse the neglect, trauma and core belief structure once they enter the criminal justice system. And all this DEI bs simply pampers the deluded belief that people are not being treated fairly. People are treated according to how they act and behave. The disproportionate number of black people in jail is not a misalignment of justice. It’s a misalignment with morals and culture.
nothercastle 2y ago
Why is that terrible? 14% of the US is black that seems reasonable considering other economical and educational disadvantages black Americas face.

thewanderer1983 2y ago

>so there go the marketing programs that were designed for the old power structure. AKA. Cheerleading for the power structures.

diogocp 2y ago

> Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. Exactly. And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days.

goatlover 2y ago
Shouting people down and canceling them is never a way to persuade people your cause is just.
- esafak 2y ago
  The goal is not to persuade them but to sideline them; to prevent them to propagating their viewpoint.
throwaway48476 2y ago
>And you're not going to change hearts and minds by silencing dissent and enforcing speech codes, as progressives are wont to do these days. This is just demonstrably untrue. For nearly a century the Soviet Union succeeded by doing exactly that. They had international support from the progressive types too.
- davidgay 2y ago
  You're moving the goal posts to try and tar your opponents with the "communist" brush. The Soviet definition of "silencing dissent" was far more extreme and violent (prison, death) than what the grandparent's comment is referring to.
- jdietrich 2y ago
  Ask anyone who grew up in the Soviet Union about that one. The vast majority of people could see through the propaganda - even supposed party loyalists - but they understood the consequences of failing to toe the line. There wasn't a sudden moment of collective enlightenment that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, just a gradual breaking of a taboo. Imposition of an ideology through coercion is remarkably durable, right until it isn't.

brutal_chaos_ 2y ago

If DEI was only marketing, why has the number and proportion of women in tech been increasing over that time? I'm not trying to challenge you, I'm just curious if you have any insight. ETA: and do you think that number will increase, stagnate, or decrease with DEI gone, and why?

lolinder 2y ago
It can be marketing and somewhat effective. I'm not trying to say that it didn't accomplish anything (though others are), I'm suggesting that it wasn't motivated by a sincere desire to accomplish something real for equity. And since the motivation was external pressure, a change in external pressure immediately triggers a pivot.
- brutal_chaos_ 2y ago
  Oh ok, that makes sense. I can agree with that. Given that, I worry the number of women will stagnate or decrease without it, which, imho, would be a detriment to the industry.
geoelectric 2y ago
There’s no reason to believe it’s primarily due to the DEI programs until it gets worse again with them gone. That’s a basic ABA flow for testing causation. Things improve on their own over time too.
- brutal_chaos_ 2y ago
  This is true. I know the change wasn't just DEI, but I thought it might have been the biggest push. And yeah, after it's gone we will see how much it helped (or not), or other influences will muddy the data and we'll never really know (unless it's a really big trend). shrug
  - snovv_crash 2y ago
    Honestly I think a lot more of it has to do with the perceived status of engineers in society - particularly teenage girls are hyper aware of social status. 15 years ago in any movie a software engineer was considered the biggest loser ever, ridiculed, and unattractive. I think if I had to choose any single thing that increased female participation in engineering the most, it was the Iron Man movies, which showed a vision of high social status in an engineer and started to break the stereotypes.

dukeofdoom 2y ago

I remember watching some event around CHAD time, where white social justice warriors on stage where making lots of social justice outrage statements, on behalf of Native Americans, in front on this native America elder. Only to have him take the microphone after them, and he was having none of it, he went up to the mic and completely denigrated them. Then it dawned on me, that these white people where literally ruining his cause by trying to take it over. And there's long history of white people doing this, where they subvert and neuter a movement and insert themselves as leaders, but only temper the cause. The end result is a kind of moderation, where no effective change happens because of it. I guess I read a similar sentiment once, where Anarchists where claiming that it was them that changed course of human history, repeatedly, by throwing the wrench in the wheels of society, to cause the change. From that point of view, it would get annoying if there was someone taking the wrench out before the fall.

aprilthird2021 2y ago

This is true, and unfortunately you can't say this to any colleagues at any of these companies without jeopardizing your future. Even still as the DEI programs are dying, the DEI social norms are still strong in most corporations

zmgsabst 2y ago

There hasn’t been a decade in the past 130 years of their existence that Progressives haven’t advocated for systemic racism. We have dozens of programs that were later legislated against or later ruled illegal by courts. There was no time Progressives were against racism. Notable black leaders like Malcolm X correctly pointed out that white Progressives never supported black people — but were appropriating their voices as a cudgel against other white people, eg in an internal power struggle of the Democratic Party where the northern Progressive faction drove out the Dixiecrats. 2025 is the year that Progressives need to accept their perennial racism is no longer acceptable, even if they appropriate the language of civil rights to justify their continued bigotry.

ConspiracyFact 2y ago
This is pretty spot-on. Whether they’re aware of it or not, most white liberals are motivated not by a desire to lift nonwhites up but rather by a desire to push “white trash” down.

unclebucknasty 2y ago

I think your analysis is missing some nuance. There are countless instances throughout history of lasting change being sparked by a single moment. Sure, that moment is frequently the culmination of some period of struggle, but you have to remember that the issues that came to a head and sparked those DEI initiatives a few years ago were exactly that—the product of literally centuries of struggle. Or, perhaps more accurately, a recent phase of that struggle. So, I believe your emphasis is on the wrong side of the equation here. That is, it's not that there is an inherent deficiency in a trending moment or ascendant party giving rise to change. It's the explicit pushback against DEI that is responsible for its unwinding. And, this effort was not successful because the party that sponsored the pushback was ascendant. Instead, part of the party's ascension was due to it making an issue of the pushback. More specifically, the blowback was part of a divisive theme, along with illegal immigration and other issues. Progress is not a one-way street and gains are not de facto insulated against erosion. Progress (and its security) is a product of the mores and culture of a time, and these can be influenced and manipulated. So, there is really not such a thing as "lasting change", and that's what we saw here. In some ways, the blowback has taken us not just back to our pre-DEI state, but to a pre-1960s mental footing.

lolinder 2y ago
The methods chosen to push this and other recent changes assumed that those advocating change would stay in power, if not in government at least in the culture. They assumed that they could keep up the pressure to act in a particular way in spite of the fact that those so pressured didn't really believe in any of it. That was a critical and fatal flaw. You can't plan change on the assumption that you'll be able to apply pressure indefinitely. You're right that there are tipping points, but they don't come at will, they come when the culture is ready for them. Push too soon, and as you note, you may actually undo progress that had already been truly won. Culture behaves like a non-Newtonian fluid: manipulate it gently and it flows smoothly. Apply too much stress too fast, and it turns into a solid and resists you. Trump did not invent that resistance, he simply untapped it and rode it to power. The progressive movement created the resistance by applying too much pressure to a culture that wasn't ready.
- 2y ago

makeitdouble 2y ago

> Change that occurs through fear of your power can only last as long as your power. Lasting change is only possible by actually changing hearts and minds. I'm trying to put in flat terms, but fundamentally power matters. This is the base of democracy: give people the power to change things, there needs to be a fear that these people will exercise their power. Changing hearts and minds is beautiful, but one reason is that it usually doesn't happen, I think very few people will ever just stop being racists for instance. They might stop saying racists things, and might care more to not go against social rules and laws, but changing their deep believes will not happen, or it will take decades, if not a lifetime. And also people are way more influenced by their everyday environments than nice speeches. Having a nation that values diversity helps more to also embrace these ideals, than living in a racist dictatorship and fighting at every corner to keep your minority voices in your heart. > It's a slow, painful process The trap is to see it as a one way ratchet, when in reality it comes and go, and the groups with the most power can revert decades of progress in a snap of finger. Women lost abortion rights over a few weeks (the leading to that was also long and slow, but when it finally happens it doesn't take much). Foreign people lost the right to return to their US home within days when the ban happened last time. Power matters.

lazide 2y ago
The issue here is that power not exercised is power lost, and power fundamentally comes down to either perceived or actual consequences. All people have some degree of racist tendencies - regardless of gender, sex, color, etc. And criminal tendencies. And other tendencies. And what actual consequences will be applied that impact one group or another tend to go in cycles/pendulum back and forth (and hence impact what percent of the population is going to do x, and how many will see real consequences for those actions). That is because when one group overdoes it (or is perceived to), enough people get tired of that group/outraged, and then things shift. And these patterns tend to be on coarse criteria like gender/sex/color/race/language, etc. because the most brazen users of any sort of shitty force/violence/shaming/whatever are exactly the type of people who are the shittiest. And every group of people have a percent that is shitty. For instance, for many years now shame has been a major consequence, along with legal action. So eventually, we end up with a group/leader essentially immune to shame and legal action, who is now going to use do all sorts of shameless and illegal things. Really, a large group of people like that. And who don’t mind violence (or the threat of it) as a potential consequence. Eventually, being a shameless crook will fall out of fashion (or will have finally hurt/pissed off enough people), and another counter group will rise to take it’s place. Often, when it gets particularly ugly/strong in one direction or another, there is also a corresponding backlash against the particularly strong users of the prior ‘fashion’ of power. Sometimes beheadings, or ostracizing, or legal harassment, or whatever. Weinstein getting what he got (as deserved as it was), was one swing. We’ll see who gets this next counter reaction. Why do you think the dems and tech companies are going out of their way to be as friendly to the incoming admin as they are? They know the score, and are trying to avoid getting whacked. Or, to quote an old western - ‘Deserve has nothing to do with it’.

Simon_O_Rourke 2y ago

> ...was driven by what was trending at the time, designed to win political points with the groups that were politically ascendant. Of course it was, and so is this latest effort from Meta. I'm sure if there was some anti-Brazilian group in power in Washington or something, you'd see Meta shutting down their offices in Rio.

mise_en_place 2y ago

[flagged]

preciousoo 2y ago
H1 Visa has existed since 1952. The 65,000 per year cap (H1B) has existed since 1990. The 20,000 quota for Masters/PhD holders has existed since 2004. What in the world are you talking about?

torginus 2y ago

I've always found these loud DEI programs incredibly uncanny - every career website loudly how important diversity and inclusiveness is for them, but in flowery language, as implying they'd actually discriminate against non-diverse hires would be illegal in most places. Which begs the question of the point of these programs, considering of why they were needed this outwards messaging against discrimination, considering it was illegal in the first place. I've witnessed the DEI transformation from the inside - which amounted to a chief diversity officer being hired, a lot of incredibly sanctimonious online trainings got scheduled for us, and rainbow flags started popping up in the weirdest places. A few coworkers I had, who checked a lot of the boxes got dragged into interviews and company events (which some found somewhat uncomfortable). Very little changed in practice, and if you didn't care to read the company newsletter (who does that anyway), then you didn't experience much of it.

steveBK123 2y ago

Largely agreed DEI was a bit of a workplace recruiting marketing/signaling exercise than something that changed demographics at work. I've worked in Wall Street tech for 20 years, and while the demographics of my coworkers have changed, it largely had nothing to do with DEI or other recruitment efforts. In the late 90s/early 00s it was FSU Russians&Ukrainians living in South Brooklyn & US born and/or raised Cantonese speaking Chinese from downtown. By late 00s, percent of Indians started to tick upwards. In 2010s, mainland Chinese students on visas ticked way up, and in 2020s one of the fastest growing groups was actually female mainland Chinese students. Campus recruiting may pat themselves on the back about finally growing the % of women, but this was largely downstream of enrollment & degree choices made by these women many years before. In many ways it's gotten a lot better as all these different groups largely work wherever in the organization. 15-20 years ago there was a big problem with the Indian UI guy loading his team with Indians, the Chinese data guy loading his team with Chinese, and the Russian backend lead hiring all Russians. You could guess what team people were on by their face, and they'd often slip into their native languages at work. Not the best for collaboration. Also agree that real change of hearts & minds is slow going over generations, and can't be legislated. That said we have made and continue to make a lot of progress. Anyone who has been alive more than 20 years should be able to recognize US culture in 2020s is so different than even 2008, 1999, 1990, or the 1980s.. I think some people mix 1) cultural change (acceptable words people use / ok jokes people make) with 2) legal changes (gay marriage rights / expanded legal protections from discrimination) and finally 3) outcome changes (higher % of group going to college / lower % of group being poor / etc). 1 moves faster than 2 which moves faster than 3. I think that's because each is downstream of the preceding change. You can't directly change outcomes in a short time span.

valval 2y ago

Worth noting that the exact same applies for environment friendliness, sustainability, pride month, etc.