5 ms·

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

• 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".
          • intended 2y ago
            >That's the rhetoric of both sides though, isn't it? yes, thats why I chose it. I think the point slipped past, we started with you saying MAGA is innocent. I pointed out that words have context. I gave an example of innocent words, which can be used by bad people, to sound just. MAGA, is in this category. Its not considered innocent, and most people will assume that you are being false or misleading when you say "i dont know why this is bad". Its kinda like showing a Man U flag in an Arsenal town - its impolite. One is expected to have the awareness of how their team is behaving and perceived. I mean, its your team, of course you should know everything about it, from its good PR to its bad PR.
            • water9 2y ago
              the issue is that the other side applied a context to it that is not the same context people who created it mean. So you’re taking your own interpretation applying it to somebody else’s saying and turning it into a negative thing even though that’s not what they mean by it. And then you are lambasting them for your own negative connotation applied to what they think is a positive thing.
      • etchalon 2y ago
        You're implying Black Americans should be thankful to return to an era where they were slightly wealthier, but had fewer rights, fewer protections and enormous, normalization, socially acceptable discrimination.
  • Cthulhu_ 2y ago
    > "we all wind up at the same place" Yes? You're presenting this as some kind of gotcha but isn't that what the ultimate goal is? I mean there's multiple ways to go about it; one that a lot of people object to is e.g. giving people jobs they're not qualified for. But another that I myself benefited from was a government that paid for everyone's education from elementary to university level, allowing me to go from a blue collar lower class to a comfortable middle class income level.
    • A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 2y ago
      Good for you for being able to use the system to you advantage. Parent has a point though. DEI goals kept moving and changing along with the language in ridiculous direction. Question of the expected future state is very much relevant here. Note that we may disagree on what is acceptable future state.
• 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
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      • KPGv2 2y ago
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        • ConspiracyFact 2y ago
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          • 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.