8 ms·

> 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,

> 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.
    - xrd 2y ago
      I was surprised when you said "just ran a campaign largely predicated" because that wasn't how I saw her campaign. And this tweet is from 2020, not 2024, so it doesn't really prove your point. Trump and his MAGA friends might have framed it that way, but I need better evidence to believe what you are asserting. It might be that this proves you didn't pay attention to what she was saying and paid attention to what others said about her?
      - water9 2y ago
        Why is make America great again so offensive? For African-Americans, the wealthiest they ever were was during the reconstruction era in the 1870s. That was because after the war, there was a shortage of skilled laborers and so they were in great demand. So this, Misnomer that make America great again is racist makes no sense. Good people don’t teach you to hate other people, remember that. You can’t do the same thing evil people do without becoming the thing that you hate. Morality is not relative. Morality is not Machiavellian
        intended 2y ago
        Without context nothing is offensive. I have no problems with Tan suits for example. Good people don’t tell you to hate, sure? They do tell you to take care of yourself and to protect yourself. That some people are evil and should be stopped. Bad people sound like good people and use different words to achieve the same goals.
        ouEight12 2y ago
        >That some people are evil and should be stopped. That's the rhetoric of both sides though, isn't it? the only difference is in who the far left vs far right each believe "should be stopped".
  - philipwhiuk 2y ago
    How do you measure that other than equality of outcomes?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      You measure how many people with different backgrounds (measured by a variety of metrics) gain entry to the pipelines that are recognized as the most common ways to gain power, wealth and prestige in a society. You don't require that they all actually gain power, wealth and prestige (since that measures something else, which could be equally important or not, depending on your perspective). If the only way to become a SCOTUS justice is to get into one of 2 or 3 law schools, and only people with a narrowly defined profile ever get into such schools, you pretty clearly do not have equality of opportunity. You can establish this even though in reality almost nobody ever becomes a SCOTUS justice.
      - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
        [flagged]
        KPGv2 2y ago
        [flagged]
        ConspiracyFact 2y ago
        [flagged]
        PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        Group level differences are of little to no value when evaluating a specific candidate. It is widely understood and accepted that males and females differ in their physiology in ways that have dramatic impacts on their capabilities. However, the two groups form overlapping bell curves, and if you're seeking someone for a task you'd be a lot better off focusing on the attributes of the individual, which may be at either end of their group bell curve or anywhere in between. Put differently, my wife, when she was a serious triathlete, would never have been able to beat the best males at any distance. But she could beat most of the males in a half ironman. So if you were interviewing her and some male to do something like a half ironman, you'd better make sure you ask a lot more than "what sex are they?". You'd better find out if the male is in the top X%, because if not, you should be hiring her instead. All of that is true despite the group differences being real and significant. Hiring is never about groups ... unless you're a racist/sexist/*ist ...
  - RestlessMind 2y ago
    > This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes. That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place. In absence of a clear definition, people just fill in whatever they want.
    - KPGv2 2y ago
      > That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means doesn't mean no one has defined it. This comment reminds me of the people who complain "the mainstream media isn't talking about XYZ" when they are, in fact, talking a lot about XYZ, but the complainant is only reading Facebook articles shared by their friends. One might consider [this seminal paper](https://web.archive.org/web/20090612025522/http://bss.sfsu.edu/naff/PA_752/Frederickson.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20090612025522/http://bss.sfsu.e...) on the concept of social equity, and then google "equity" to see how institutions are using the term. Most of them, you can see a connection between the ideas expressed in that paper and the definitions the modern institutions purport to believe in.
      - water9 2y ago
        It’s the government’s job to make the playing field equal, it’s not the government’s job to make sure everybody ties. The fact that you don’t recognize that they swap the word equality for equity means that you’re missing something.. It wasn’t by accident. It doesn’t make you like some sort of prodigal genius to cite some Marxist garbage and pretend like yeah if we only did it right this 270th time it’d be perfect. Like you think you can do it better than stalin, huh? And even if you could, what makes you think someone wouldn’t take you out. You can never have equity because people will never work equal equally as hard. That is a fundamental fact of humanity.
      - RestlessMind 2y ago
        > Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means I also didn't bother to look up the meanings of equality, fairness or diversity. But those words are fairly straightforward and one learns them when one learns English. "Equity" is one where the implied usage in corporate settings is pretty confusing given the standard meaning (see next para) of that word. So if my corporate bosses and HR are going to use that word, it is on them to educate and address the confusion of the audience. Dictionary definitions of equity: "the quality of being fair and impartial", "the value of the shares issued by a company". Assuming it's the former, what does my HR even mean when they say we should be "fair and impartial"? On the one hand, that's a given, like saying "we should obey all the laws". On the other hand, if we are not being fair and impartial, then HR should lay out specific ways in which we are not and also the specific remedies.
  - swatcoder 2y ago
    The challenge is that only some "historical inequalities" reduce to skin color, so it becomes easy to start favoring certain "historical inequalities" over others because of their political salience rather than their severity, intensity, extent, impact, etc. And that can very easily start to look like a kind of racism itself.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      Which more severe or intense or extensive or impactful historical inequalities are you thinking of?
      - swatcoder 2y ago
        You can't really measure any of them in an indisputable and quantitative way, can you? That's kind of the point! But we all know that there are innumerable stories of families and cultures that have suffered, struggled, been exploited, been abused, and been excluded for generations or centuries in ways that they still are deeply disadvantaged for today. Who might see more impact from more opportunity though: * the poverty-raised first-generation-collegiate grandchild of a Russian refugee whose family history is just hundreds of years of serfdom followed immediately by Soviet oppression * the Stanford alum son of a middle class Chinese immigrant who came here to run a thriving import/export business They both face structured disadvantages compared to some other people, but skin color doesn't do a good job of telling you where a helping hand might contribute to the more equitable future or which will add more diversity of perspective/culture to a workplace. Programs like DEI often assume all PoC as similarly disadvantaged, and then contrast them against an archetype of an uncommonly successful and priveleged imaginary WASP. But the reality of history and equity involves far more dimensions and many more fine distinctions.
      - Radim 2y ago
        The one that gave us the very word "slave"? To GP's point, skin colour did not seem to be the salient factor there.
      - Levitz 2y ago
        Being poor. A rich person descendant of slaves is very clearly advantaged against a poor person descendant of slave owners. This is so evident that even those thinking that the "historical inequalities" are the important bit can't help themselves but turn to money at every step of the way to fix then.
  - mjevans 2y ago
    Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary. Measure stuff you have an opportunity to see without human bias or algorithms that are easily gamed? Measure, what is a desirable outcome? As someone who's been looking for a job that will take a chance on how I can grow to full their needs rather than already being a perfect match; I would really love someplace that had a 'career pivot' entry track and not just a recent / about to grad track. Maybe something like a 1 week, then 1 month (3 more weeks), then 3 months (total), then every 3rd month evaluation track for working the job in a 'temp to hire' sense with a 1 year cutoff so they can't just keep hiring 'perma temps' like in the past. I understand there's risks, and I understand it's very hard for both sides. However there's a ton of untapped potential and corporations are the ones who aren't offering a way of tapping it.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      > Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary. Ivy League schools in the US have been doing this for rather a long time now. Whether they are any good at it is subject to significant debate, but they certainly like to pretend that they can evaluate it. Their evaluations tend to show a strong belief in the hereditary properties of "potential", which is not well established in actual objective research.
      - gg82 2y ago
        They mostly do it by measuring the family bank accounts!
    - User23 2y ago
      Measuring potential isn’t particularly difficult. Everyone from the NFL to the US military does an adequate job of it. Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s literally good enough for government work.
      - jimnotgym 2y ago
        Most tests for potential are easily gamed by people who are taught how to pass the test, or simply avoided by people whose wealth and social status allows them to avoid the test. For example: When I was 18 I was completely overlooked by the NFL because I had never played gridiron football. Had I been coached professionally for 10 years I may have been a star. I sat in an interview for an army officer scholarship once, acutely aware that the man testing me had an accent that made it clear he was from a higher social class than me. He mentioned that I was not properly prepared for the meeting, but I was given no notes as to what to prepare. I was told later that in the private schools that feed the majority of candidates to this route, that they coach their pupils specifically for this test. So I would like to hear a test for potential that is not easily gamed by wealthy people
  - ponow 2y ago
    No, it's equal outcones, or worse, turn the tables. Racist hiring aka affirmative action illustrates this.
  - Sabinus 2y ago
    >historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race Highly correlated with one race for a particular moment in history. New immigrants from Africa don't share the same disadvantage. Is targeting a divisive proxy for disadvantage worth targeting when you can just target poverty itself?
    - lazide 2y ago
      Ah, the problem for many people is they see being poor as the worst sin of all.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different. I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia? Many people alive today have parents that went to segregated schools in America. But my dad went to a school without walls in a Bangladeshi village. That’s almost certainly worse in terms of objective educational quality. But why does that path dependence mater anyway?
    - KPGv2 2y ago
      > Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different. It is not clear to me that they are fundamentally different in any way other than deontology.
      - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
        Hmm. I think you suffer from the illusion that your shell does not influence your behavior. Even if we are the same species, the genetic baggage, expression of that baggage and how we react to it cannot simply be ignored as not 'fundamentally different' partially, because genetic makeup is very much part of the foundation. We are not all the same. It is silly to suggest that. We share common form factor and there are things that bring us together, but pretending otherwise is how we end up where we are now.
    - fzeroracer 2y ago
      > Are we perpetuating them? Yes. > Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia? Because Black people are jailed at far higher rates than white people. The poor white potsmoker in Appalachia is likely to get a pass from the police while the Black man gets jailed for 10 years and sentenced to forced labor for pennies. Now what would you call this exactly?
  - skellington 2y ago
    The gaslighting from the DEI types is unrelenting. I've been in the corporate DEI training courses. I've read the CRT papers and books that are the influences of the DEI types. They all define equity as EQUAL OUTCOMES not equal opportunity. And they all say that the ONLY reason why we don't get equal outcomes now is because of structural -isms. There is NO concept of individual merit in the source materials that lead to DEI ideas because DEI/CRT are offshoots of 'critical theories' which are related to our favorite communism/Marxist ideologies. This is not hyperbole. (Mark Cuban is absolutely wrong the way he describes DEI vs what the proponents are really demanding in case that's where you got your idea about DEI from.) But at the same time, it's true that most companies use DEI for marketing and conveniently ignore the equity part because it would lay bare their hypocrisy when their CEO gets paid $50 million a year.
  - naasking 2y ago
    > 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. You can recognize this without accepting that an infrastructure of explicit racial discrimination is a good idea. Many, many people seem to miss this point.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  Unfortunately your alternative is a society engineered from the top down to be deliberately unfair.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life." -Jean-Luc Picard Additionally, the Declaration of Independence states our fundamental philosophy as a nation that all men are created equal. We all start from the same line, but where life takes us and what we make of it is completely up to life and us the individual.
    - galaxyLogic 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - skellington 2y ago
        It is commonly understood that 'men' in that context and in the context of the time is a reference to 'mankind' or 'the race of men' which means the human race, not males specifically.
        StackRanker3000 2y ago
        So why weren’t women allowed to vote when those words were written?
        Levitz 2y ago
        It's not as if every man was able to vote back then either. Property owners, of age, white. The story of universal suffrage isn't that clear cut.
        StackRanker3000 2y ago
        So did the Founding Fathers actually believe that all human beings were created equal?
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity. Or, more specifically, because outcomes are proportional to opportunity, there is only so much that can be explained by variability in knowledge, effort, or circumstances. When the system consistently hands out bad outcomes to one group of people, it's reasonable to at least assume there is analogous bias in the opportunities that were presented to that same group. In other words, equity and equal outcomes are not a goal, they're a heuristic. Same as how logical fallacies, while wrong, are still valuable heuristics. My read on the past decade is that most DEI programs were adopted in blue[0] spaces primarily to redirect Progressive voices away from questions of economic justice and elite control. That is, businesses virtue-signal the most tolerable Progressive politics in order to distract rank-and-file Democratic voters away from questions like "isn't it fucked up that Mexico is basically a perma-scab to bust unions with" or "why are we just letting Facebook buy up all the social media". To be clear, you're right that these companies want to engineer society from the top down. But it's not about handing out high-paying jobs to the unqualified for the lulz, it's about making Facebook into the new Boeing - a company that is so integral to the operation of the state that shipping software that murders people is considered an excusable mistake. If that means Facebook has to change political alliances every so often, then so be it. [0] As in, "aligned with the Democratic Party leadership", not "left-wing"
  - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
    > Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity. Only if you assume that group-level differences can’t exist.
    - galaxyLogic 2y ago
      But, group-level differences are probably caused by inequality of opportunity. Or are you thinking they caused by genetics?
      - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
        I think that the most likely explanation is that both environment and genetics are factors. In order to view inequality of outcome as proof of inequality of opportunity, you have to believe that group differences are due entirely to environmental conditions. That's a rather extreme position to take.
- xocnad 2y ago
  Since you are qualifying what type of societal engineers you don't trust are there ones that you do?
  - wsintra2022 2y ago
    Hip hop artists from the 90s I thought for a while. Nowadays not sure anymore. Folk artists from any decade are usually my more trusted societal engineers, going all the way back to maybe even before Jesus.
- spiritplumber 2y ago
  Equity is more like... wheelchair ramps. Or chirpers at traffic lights for blind folks. Or subtitles.
UncleMeat 2y ago
MLK's ideals were not colorblindness. He explicitly supported race-specific reparations and policies that focused on repairing specific racial oppression and suffering. MLK had one famous line in a speech that has been leveraged by reactionaries to use him as a weapon against advocates of racial liberation. But that is not an honest use of his beliefs.
- ponow 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - Izkata 2y ago
    Yep, that's exactly why it became the thing he's known for.
  - NotSammyHagar 2y ago
    what is the commie stuff?
    - raffraffraff 2y ago
      Dunno but I wonder if Jesus would be considered a commie if he appeared incognito in 1950s America.
      - Draiken 2y ago
        [flagged]
  - UncleMeat 2y ago
    You could claim that if you want, I suppose. But the post above me said "MLK’s of vision equality", which is not a system of official colorblindness.
- nine_k 2y ago
  MLK was a minister (because Baptists don't have priesthood), Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He was profoundly Christian. The whole movement for racial equality, and thus liberation, in the USA grew from intensely Christian foundations. One of the core tenets of abolitionism was the idea that humans are created equal, and such attributes as race or skin color are irrelevant before God, and hence to the faithful, too. Christ specifically said that being a Greek or being a Jew does not matter before God, and being a slave or being a master also does not matter; all are equal. So, certain amounts of colorblindness are inherent to the very idea of people of different origins being equal, as it emerged in the USA, and supposedly elsewhere in the Christian-dominated areas of the world. Also, it's the idea of equality, equal worth (before God), not of fairness or compensation; the latter might come from atonement and Christian love to the neighbor. Eventually other ideas took hold and somehow eclipsed the initial ideas, not just of 1860s but also of MLK's.
spaceguillotine 2y ago
MLK was a communist who was killed for his views by the US Government. He was not the harmony flowers and rainbows he was white washed into. Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.
- thefounder 2y ago
  >> Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force. That's simply not true. You can also be persistent instead to be violent(i.e by force). A small group of people with the same goal can do wonders without being violent.
  - maeil 2y ago
    This only ever happens when protesting those with fairly little power, very lower middle management, and those in actual power don't care. It's also become less and less common over time, as the focus on next quarter shareholder returns and hoarding of wealth even when past the point of ever being able to spend it all has increased every single year for decades. And this focus overrules everything else. Syria had plenty of peaceful protests against Assad. Russia against Putin. China aginst the CCP. The participants generally aren't doing very well. Hong Kong had enormous, mass protests. Georgia (the country) has had big ones recently. Occupy Wall Street was big and peaceful. What did that accomplish again? Everything they protested against has only intensified.
    - thefounder 2y ago
      It won’t happen overnight. It’s not like violence beings best results that fast. What did Bin Laden accomplish in the U.S with his violent protests/terrorism ? Or the Islamic state? Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
      - ben_w 2y ago
        > What did Bin Laden accomplish in the U.S with his violent protests/terrorism ? He convinced one of his enemies, the USA, too eliminate one of his other enemies, Iraq's Sadam Hussein. (Or the US was incompetent enough to do that all by itself, hard for me to be sure). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_link_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li... And the Taliban is back in charge of Afghanistan. > Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it? No, it didn't. On the other hand, it triggered such a response from Israel as to make Israel a pariah in the eyes of many, and attempts at prosecution for genocide — something I have been told motivated some of the Israeli protesters against Netinyahu.

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.
  - xrd 2y ago
    I was surprised when you said "just ran a campaign largely predicated" because that wasn't how I saw her campaign. And this tweet is from 2020, not 2024, so it doesn't really prove your point. Trump and his MAGA friends might have framed it that way, but I need better evidence to believe what you are asserting. It might be that this proves you didn't pay attention to what she was saying and paid attention to what others said about her?
    - water9 2y ago
      Why is make America great again so offensive? For African-Americans, the wealthiest they ever were was during the reconstruction era in the 1870s. That was because after the war, there was a shortage of skilled laborers and so they were in great demand. So this, Misnomer that make America great again is racist makes no sense. Good people don’t teach you to hate other people, remember that. You can’t do the same thing evil people do without becoming the thing that you hate. Morality is not relative. Morality is not Machiavellian
      - intended 2y ago
        Without context nothing is offensive. I have no problems with Tan suits for example. Good people don’t tell you to hate, sure? They do tell you to take care of yourself and to protect yourself. That some people are evil and should be stopped. Bad people sound like good people and use different words to achieve the same goals.
        ouEight12 2y ago
        >That some people are evil and should be stopped. That's the rhetoric of both sides though, isn't it? the only difference is in who the far left vs far right each believe "should be stopped".
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  How do you measure that other than equality of outcomes?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    You measure how many people with different backgrounds (measured by a variety of metrics) gain entry to the pipelines that are recognized as the most common ways to gain power, wealth and prestige in a society. You don't require that they all actually gain power, wealth and prestige (since that measures something else, which could be equally important or not, depending on your perspective). If the only way to become a SCOTUS justice is to get into one of 2 or 3 law schools, and only people with a narrowly defined profile ever get into such schools, you pretty clearly do not have equality of opportunity. You can establish this even though in reality almost nobody ever becomes a SCOTUS justice.
    - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - KPGv2 2y ago
        [flagged]
        ConspiracyFact 2y ago
        [flagged]
        PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
        Group level differences are of little to no value when evaluating a specific candidate. It is widely understood and accepted that males and females differ in their physiology in ways that have dramatic impacts on their capabilities. However, the two groups form overlapping bell curves, and if you're seeking someone for a task you'd be a lot better off focusing on the attributes of the individual, which may be at either end of their group bell curve or anywhere in between. Put differently, my wife, when she was a serious triathlete, would never have been able to beat the best males at any distance. But she could beat most of the males in a half ironman. So if you were interviewing her and some male to do something like a half ironman, you'd better make sure you ask a lot more than "what sex are they?". You'd better find out if the male is in the top X%, because if not, you should be hiring her instead. All of that is true despite the group differences being real and significant. Hiring is never about groups ... unless you're a racist/sexist/*ist ...
- RestlessMind 2y ago
  > This is a common misinterpretation. It's not about equality of outcomes. That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place. In absence of a clear definition, people just fill in whatever they want.
  - KPGv2 2y ago
    > That's because no one really defined what "equity" means in the first place Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means doesn't mean no one has defined it. This comment reminds me of the people who complain "the mainstream media isn't talking about XYZ" when they are, in fact, talking a lot about XYZ, but the complainant is only reading Facebook articles shared by their friends. One might consider [this seminal paper](https://web.archive.org/web/20090612025522/http://bss.sfsu.edu/naff/PA_752/Frederickson.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20090612025522/http://bss.sfsu.e...) on the concept of social equity, and then google "equity" to see how institutions are using the term. Most of them, you can see a connection between the ideas expressed in that paper and the definitions the modern institutions purport to believe in.
    - water9 2y ago
      It’s the government’s job to make the playing field equal, it’s not the government’s job to make sure everybody ties. The fact that you don’t recognize that they swap the word equality for equity means that you’re missing something.. It wasn’t by accident. It doesn’t make you like some sort of prodigal genius to cite some Marxist garbage and pretend like yeah if we only did it right this 270th time it’d be perfect. Like you think you can do it better than stalin, huh? And even if you could, what makes you think someone wouldn’t take you out. You can never have equity because people will never work equal equally as hard. That is a fundamental fact of humanity.
    - RestlessMind 2y ago
      > Just because you haven't bothered to look up what it means I also didn't bother to look up the meanings of equality, fairness or diversity. But those words are fairly straightforward and one learns them when one learns English. "Equity" is one where the implied usage in corporate settings is pretty confusing given the standard meaning (see next para) of that word. So if my corporate bosses and HR are going to use that word, it is on them to educate and address the confusion of the audience. Dictionary definitions of equity: "the quality of being fair and impartial", "the value of the shares issued by a company". Assuming it's the former, what does my HR even mean when they say we should be "fair and impartial"? On the one hand, that's a given, like saying "we should obey all the laws". On the other hand, if we are not being fair and impartial, then HR should lay out specific ways in which we are not and also the specific remedies.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  The challenge is that only some "historical inequalities" reduce to skin color, so it becomes easy to start favoring certain "historical inequalities" over others because of their political salience rather than their severity, intensity, extent, impact, etc. And that can very easily start to look like a kind of racism itself.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Which more severe or intense or extensive or impactful historical inequalities are you thinking of?
    - swatcoder 2y ago
      You can't really measure any of them in an indisputable and quantitative way, can you? That's kind of the point! But we all know that there are innumerable stories of families and cultures that have suffered, struggled, been exploited, been abused, and been excluded for generations or centuries in ways that they still are deeply disadvantaged for today. Who might see more impact from more opportunity though: * the poverty-raised first-generation-collegiate grandchild of a Russian refugee whose family history is just hundreds of years of serfdom followed immediately by Soviet oppression * the Stanford alum son of a middle class Chinese immigrant who came here to run a thriving import/export business They both face structured disadvantages compared to some other people, but skin color doesn't do a good job of telling you where a helping hand might contribute to the more equitable future or which will add more diversity of perspective/culture to a workplace. Programs like DEI often assume all PoC as similarly disadvantaged, and then contrast them against an archetype of an uncommonly successful and priveleged imaginary WASP. But the reality of history and equity involves far more dimensions and many more fine distinctions.
    - Radim 2y ago
      The one that gave us the very word "slave"? To GP's point, skin colour did not seem to be the salient factor there.
    - Levitz 2y ago
      Being poor. A rich person descendant of slaves is very clearly advantaged against a poor person descendant of slave owners. This is so evident that even those thinking that the "historical inequalities" are the important bit can't help themselves but turn to money at every step of the way to fix then.
- mjevans 2y ago
  Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary. Measure stuff you have an opportunity to see without human bias or algorithms that are easily gamed? Measure, what is a desirable outcome? As someone who's been looking for a job that will take a chance on how I can grow to full their needs rather than already being a perfect match; I would really love someplace that had a 'career pivot' entry track and not just a recent / about to grad track. Maybe something like a 1 week, then 1 month (3 more weeks), then 3 months (total), then every 3rd month evaluation track for working the job in a 'temp to hire' sense with a 1 year cutoff so they can't just keep hiring 'perma temps' like in the past. I understand there's risks, and I understand it's very hard for both sides. However there's a ton of untapped potential and corporations are the ones who aren't offering a way of tapping it.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    > Evaluating potential is difficult. Measure something that isn't in a thin history summary. Ivy League schools in the US have been doing this for rather a long time now. Whether they are any good at it is subject to significant debate, but they certainly like to pretend that they can evaluate it. Their evaluations tend to show a strong belief in the hereditary properties of "potential", which is not well established in actual objective research.
    - gg82 2y ago
      They mostly do it by measuring the family bank accounts!
  - User23 2y ago
    Measuring potential isn’t particularly difficult. Everyone from the NFL to the US military does an adequate job of it. Of course it’s not perfect, but it’s literally good enough for government work.
    - jimnotgym 2y ago
      Most tests for potential are easily gamed by people who are taught how to pass the test, or simply avoided by people whose wealth and social status allows them to avoid the test. For example: When I was 18 I was completely overlooked by the NFL because I had never played gridiron football. Had I been coached professionally for 10 years I may have been a star. I sat in an interview for an army officer scholarship once, acutely aware that the man testing me had an accent that made it clear he was from a higher social class than me. He mentioned that I was not properly prepared for the meeting, but I was given no notes as to what to prepare. I was told later that in the private schools that feed the majority of candidates to this route, that they coach their pupils specifically for this test. So I would like to hear a test for potential that is not easily gamed by wealthy people
- ponow 2y ago
  No, it's equal outcones, or worse, turn the tables. Racist hiring aka affirmative action illustrates this.
- Sabinus 2y ago
  >historical inequalities that are highly correlated with race Highly correlated with one race for a particular moment in history. New immigrants from Africa don't share the same disadvantage. Is targeting a divisive proxy for disadvantage worth targeting when you can just target poverty itself?
  - lazide 2y ago
    Ah, the problem for many people is they see being poor as the worst sin of all.
- rayiner 2y ago
  Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different. I don’t see why being civilized requires undoing persistent effects of past bad acts. Everyone’s economic circumstances are an accident of birth. Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia? Many people alive today have parents that went to segregated schools in America. But my dad went to a school without walls in a Bangladeshi village. That’s almost certainly worse in terms of objective educational quality. But why does that path dependence mater anyway?
  - KPGv2 2y ago
    > Are we perpetuating them? Or we just not undertaking to undo the effects? Those two things are fundamentally different. It is not clear to me that they are fundamentally different in any way other than deontology.
    - A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
      Hmm. I think you suffer from the illusion that your shell does not influence your behavior. Even if we are the same species, the genetic baggage, expression of that baggage and how we react to it cannot simply be ignored as not 'fundamentally different' partially, because genetic makeup is very much part of the foundation. We are not all the same. It is silly to suggest that. We share common form factor and there are things that bring us together, but pretending otherwise is how we end up where we are now.
  - fzeroracer 2y ago
    > Are we perpetuating them? Yes. > Why is it any different—to people who exist in the present—whether you’re poor because you were born black in inner city Baltimore versus being poor because you were born white in Appalachia? Because Black people are jailed at far higher rates than white people. The poor white potsmoker in Appalachia is likely to get a pass from the police while the Black man gets jailed for 10 years and sentenced to forced labor for pennies. Now what would you call this exactly?
- skellington 2y ago
  The gaslighting from the DEI types is unrelenting. I've been in the corporate DEI training courses. I've read the CRT papers and books that are the influences of the DEI types. They all define equity as EQUAL OUTCOMES not equal opportunity. And they all say that the ONLY reason why we don't get equal outcomes now is because of structural -isms. There is NO concept of individual merit in the source materials that lead to DEI ideas because DEI/CRT are offshoots of 'critical theories' which are related to our favorite communism/Marxist ideologies. This is not hyperbole. (Mark Cuban is absolutely wrong the way he describes DEI vs what the proponents are really demanding in case that's where you got your idea about DEI from.) But at the same time, it's true that most companies use DEI for marketing and conveniently ignore the equity part because it would lay bare their hypocrisy when their CEO gets paid $50 million a year.
- naasking 2y ago
  > 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. You can recognize this without accepting that an infrastructure of explicit racial discrimination is a good idea. Many, many people seem to miss this point.
gopher_space 2y ago
Unfortunately your alternative is a society engineered from the top down to be deliberately unfair.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life." -Jean-Luc Picard Additionally, the Declaration of Independence states our fundamental philosophy as a nation that all men are created equal. We all start from the same line, but where life takes us and what we make of it is completely up to life and us the individual.
  - galaxyLogic 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - skellington 2y ago
      It is commonly understood that 'men' in that context and in the context of the time is a reference to 'mankind' or 'the race of men' which means the human race, not males specifically.
      - StackRanker3000 2y ago
        So why weren’t women allowed to vote when those words were written?
        Levitz 2y ago
        It's not as if every man was able to vote back then either. Property owners, of age, white. The story of universal suffrage isn't that clear cut.
        StackRanker3000 2y ago
        So did the Founding Fathers actually believe that all human beings were created equal?
kmeisthax 2y ago
Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity. Or, more specifically, because outcomes are proportional to opportunity, there is only so much that can be explained by variability in knowledge, effort, or circumstances. When the system consistently hands out bad outcomes to one group of people, it's reasonable to at least assume there is analogous bias in the opportunities that were presented to that same group. In other words, equity and equal outcomes are not a goal, they're a heuristic. Same as how logical fallacies, while wrong, are still valuable heuristics. My read on the past decade is that most DEI programs were adopted in blue[0] spaces primarily to redirect Progressive voices away from questions of economic justice and elite control. That is, businesses virtue-signal the most tolerable Progressive politics in order to distract rank-and-file Democratic voters away from questions like "isn't it fucked up that Mexico is basically a perma-scab to bust unions with" or "why are we just letting Facebook buy up all the social media". To be clear, you're right that these companies want to engineer society from the top down. But it's not about handing out high-paying jobs to the unqualified for the lulz, it's about making Facebook into the new Boeing - a company that is so integral to the operation of the state that shipping software that murders people is considered an excusable mistake. If that means Facebook has to change political alliances every so often, then so be it. [0] As in, "aligned with the Democratic Party leadership", not "left-wing"
- ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  > Equality of outcome is implied by equality of opportunity. Only if you assume that group-level differences can’t exist.
  - galaxyLogic 2y ago
    But, group-level differences are probably caused by inequality of opportunity. Or are you thinking they caused by genetics?
    - ConspiracyFact 2y ago
      I think that the most likely explanation is that both environment and genetics are factors. In order to view inequality of outcome as proof of inequality of opportunity, you have to believe that group differences are due entirely to environmental conditions. That's a rather extreme position to take.
xocnad 2y ago
Since you are qualifying what type of societal engineers you don't trust are there ones that you do?
- wsintra2022 2y ago
  Hip hop artists from the 90s I thought for a while. Nowadays not sure anymore. Folk artists from any decade are usually my more trusted societal engineers, going all the way back to maybe even before Jesus.
spiritplumber 2y ago
Equity is more like... wheelchair ramps. Or chirpers at traffic lights for blind folks. Or subtitles.

UncleMeat 2y ago

MLK's ideals were not colorblindness. He explicitly supported race-specific reparations and policies that focused on repairing specific racial oppression and suffering. MLK had one famous line in a speech that has been leveraged by reactionaries to use him as a weapon against advocates of racial liberation. But that is not an honest use of his beliefs.

ponow 2y ago
[flagged]
- Izkata 2y ago
  Yep, that's exactly why it became the thing he's known for.
- NotSammyHagar 2y ago
  what is the commie stuff?
  - raffraffraff 2y ago
    Dunno but I wonder if Jesus would be considered a commie if he appeared incognito in 1950s America.
    - Draiken 2y ago
      [flagged]
- UncleMeat 2y ago
  You could claim that if you want, I suppose. But the post above me said "MLK’s of vision equality", which is not a system of official colorblindness.
nine_k 2y ago
MLK was a minister (because Baptists don't have priesthood), Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. He was profoundly Christian. The whole movement for racial equality, and thus liberation, in the USA grew from intensely Christian foundations. One of the core tenets of abolitionism was the idea that humans are created equal, and such attributes as race or skin color are irrelevant before God, and hence to the faithful, too. Christ specifically said that being a Greek or being a Jew does not matter before God, and being a slave or being a master also does not matter; all are equal. So, certain amounts of colorblindness are inherent to the very idea of people of different origins being equal, as it emerged in the USA, and supposedly elsewhere in the Christian-dominated areas of the world. Also, it's the idea of equality, equal worth (before God), not of fairness or compensation; the latter might come from atonement and Christian love to the neighbor. Eventually other ideas took hold and somehow eclipsed the initial ideas, not just of 1860s but also of MLK's.

spaceguillotine 2y ago

MLK was a communist who was killed for his views by the US Government. He was not the harmony flowers and rainbows he was white washed into. Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force.

thefounder 2y ago
>> Rights are never given, they have to be taken by force. That's simply not true. You can also be persistent instead to be violent(i.e by force). A small group of people with the same goal can do wonders without being violent.
- maeil 2y ago
  This only ever happens when protesting those with fairly little power, very lower middle management, and those in actual power don't care. It's also become less and less common over time, as the focus on next quarter shareholder returns and hoarding of wealth even when past the point of ever being able to spend it all has increased every single year for decades. And this focus overrules everything else. Syria had plenty of peaceful protests against Assad. Russia against Putin. China aginst the CCP. The participants generally aren't doing very well. Hong Kong had enormous, mass protests. Georgia (the country) has had big ones recently. Occupy Wall Street was big and peaceful. What did that accomplish again? Everything they protested against has only intensified.
  - thefounder 2y ago
    It won’t happen overnight. It’s not like violence beings best results that fast. What did Bin Laden accomplish in the U.S with his violent protests/terrorism ? Or the Islamic state? Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it?
    - ben_w 2y ago
      > What did Bin Laden accomplish in the U.S with his violent protests/terrorism ? He convinced one of his enemies, the USA, too eliminate one of his other enemies, Iraq's Sadam Hussein. (Or the US was incompetent enough to do that all by itself, hard for me to be sure). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_link_allegations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_li... And the Taliban is back in charge of Afghanistan. > Not to mention the latest wonder from Gaza…it didn’t go down that well, did it? No, it didn't. On the other hand, it triggered such a response from Israel as to make Israel a pariah in the eyes of many, and attempts at prosecution for genocide — something I have been told motivated some of the Israeli protesters against Netinyahu.