I agree with everything you said. And with the folks upthread who point out “DEI” has become a RW sneer-word devoid of any depper or well-thought-out meaning beyond the sneer itself.
But… there’s a meta level to this and that’s what I want to talk about. You said
With the VP nomination, there are many political implications taken into account, so there aren’t any straight white males that could actually fill those requirements
And quite rightly so. But the reason these political considerations exist is part of exactly what the anti-DEI forces are pushing back on.
In their view non-white non-male interests should not matter, and ideally should not even exist. The first mistake of modern society, in their view, was to even let the idea that white males weren’t the only legit kind of human come into discussion. That a hefty fraction of the populace now considers that heretical thinking to be self-evident actual fact is appalling to these people.
DEI hiring is a predictable downstream outcome of a process that in their view should have been strangled at birth long ago. And which they have every intention of strangling regardless of age as soon as they get their hands of the levers of power.
In their view white-male-only politics are the only Good Kind.
In addition to all the other valid points: Harris wasn’t hired. She was elected by the voters. Just like she was elected Senator, and Attorney General, and District Attorney.
Yes. I posted this sentiment on X the other day (without the blank spaces) and got warned that I violated their standards of discourse. But yeah that’s all it means. It’s really simple.
Well, she was chosen as a running mate by Biden and his campaign. And there’s a long tradition of VP nominees being chosen for reasons of geographical diversity and inclusion.
Unfortunately, the Republicans have done a pretty successful job of hijacking the terminology of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in hiring and employment. DEI programs have never been about “making sure” a member of an underrepresented class gets a job or promotion. These programs – at least the good ones – were designed to ensure that employment decisions were not rooted in biased assumptions about what makes a good candidate, and that candidates of all backgrounds are given full and fair consideration for a job opportunity.
At their best, these programs force employers to question the basis for why they hire and promote certain candidates. “We’ve always hired engineers from so-and-so university because everybody knows they’re the best. But what’s the evidence of that? Why haven’t we recruited at that HBCU? By scheduling professional development opportunities on evenings are we disadvantaging the single mother?”
But yes, it’s become Republican shorthand for “give the n***** the job.”
Just like the President, only people who hire the Vice President are the voters. I’m sure there are some people who may have voted for her in an attempt to increase equity for African Americans, but it is not what the Biden/Harris campaign ran on.
If they’re going to use the term “DEI hire,” I’m going to insist they use it to mean what those words actually mean. If it’s just a snarl word, then they can apply it to anyone.
Well, I think in reality most DEI programs—even well-intentioned ones—are about making a corporation or institution look as if they are ‘all about’ diversity and inclusion, even if they accomplish very little in changing hiring practices at the working level or provides useful guidance to recruiters and hiring managers. Personally, I think that inclusion and diversity are important (I’m still not clear on what ‘equity’ means in this context or how a hiring manager is supposed to correct for systemic bias) but these programs are frequently corporate window dressing that offer little useful guidance and are often seemingly at odds with corporate ethics standards and employment law, which makes it difficult to defend their legitimacy even though the intent is valid.
As noted above, pretty much the only purpose of selecting a Vice Presidential running mate is to attract a broader demographic. They are infrequently selected for any kind of legislative or executive competence (witness J. Danforth Quayle) and are often even at odds with their running mate on policy issues (Eisenhower/Nixon, Kennedy/Johnson, Johnson/Humphrey, Reagan/Bush). Vance was clearly selected to bring in the “Hillbilly Elegy” demographic as well as douchy SiVal venture capital brohs, which now seems to be a choice that Republicans in general and Trump in particular seem to have buyers remorse over. I’m not especially bullish on Harris (and no, Biden did not publicly announce that he would be selecting a Vice Presidential pick that was a black woman, although that was the rumor as the media swirl churned its way through lists) but she’s far from the least qualified Vice Presidential candidate in living memory, and she’s been a stalwart promoter of Biden’s policy and accomplishments, which is really the main role of the Vice President. If she is a “DEI hire” then I guess that demonstrates that diversity and inclusion were good considerations.
Biden did publicly announce that he would select a Black woman as his Supreme Court nominee. I guess you can categorize this as “DEI”, especially given that there have only been five women and two Black justices in the history of the Supreme Court but given that Blacks are incarcerated at much higher rates, and women are underrepresented in both the judiciary and the legislature, striving for some kind of proportional representation on the Supreme Court is genuinely an important consideration since justices don’t just bring their knowledge of statute and caselaw to the bench but also their lived experience in being a member of American society. But Brown brought much more to the Supreme Court than a dark complexion and a pair of ovaries, or even the person knowledge of prejudice and challenge she has experienced; she’s the first federal public defender, has served as a justice in both federal District Court and US Court of Appeals, and is generally a highly regarded jurist. She also didn’t spend significant portions of her hearing saying “I like beer!” or shouting at committee members, and bore some of the most absurd performative interrogation by Senators Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham with more patience and grace than anyone could reasonably expect, so “DEI” or not, it seems like she vaulted what has become a pretty low bar with aplomb.
For example, if a company is consistently hiring black women with the same qualifications at 20% less pay than their average new hires for the same roles, that’s something to look at.
And there are absolutely ways hiring managers can if not eliminate, then at least ameliorate, non-job factors like race or gender in such considerations.
Related factoid: One variant of “DEI” is IDEA (inclusivity, diversity, equity, access). I wish it would catch on more, just because it’s nice to have an IDEA.
More like any minority race, not just African-Americans - or women in a men-predominant field. But again, it’s about qualifications.
A true DEI hire (as defined by the right) would be picking an Arab, Hispanic, woman, gay, Muslim, black, Asian, Native American, Arab or whatever person as an appointee solely because you want someone of that skin color, gender or whatnot for publicity purposes despite their being unqualified. It’s closely related to tokenism.
Yes, and this sort of clumsy language by Biden is what feeds conservative accusations about DEI being based off of skin rather than merit. Biden should have said, “I’ll pick the most qualified nominee” and then it happens to be Ketanji Jackson, a black woman. Instead, he flat-out said, “I’ll pick a nominee based off of her skin and her gender.”
As it was explained to me in a three hour training video on how to create a DEI hiring plan (a new corporate requirement I had when I was a hiring manager) “equity” was about systemic bias, prejudice, and inequality. Which, I agree, are problems that absolutely need to be addressed, but as a manager hiring for a small handful of reqs, that’s levying way too much on a manager just struggling to find and vet candidates who even meet the minimum qualifications. And when I am critiqued that the plan cannot be “operationalized” because there is literally no legal way to create metrics to show that diversity was improved, I’m then left in limbo. I literally lost a candidate who would have fit into multiple ‘diverse’ categories because she got tired of waiting for the req to be formally posted because I couldn’t get an approved DEI hiring plan, nor any useful guidance whatsoever from the person responsible for approving the plan.
I’ve argued for years that pay should be based upon a job grade corresponding to responsibilities and ‘time-in-grade’, such that there is an objective standard for what people get paid that is blinded from any kind of bias or prejudice on the part of a manager, and even informally instituted such a system within my group. Then we have a seeker’s market where salaries jump double digit percentages, and we end up with new hires at a lower grade making more than someone with five years in the next highest grade, and I spend years trying to ‘fix’ the salary structure with resistance based on the mentality of, “Why should we pay someone more than we’ve been paying them to do the same job as before?”
I don’t know what the best answer is to address ‘equity’ but frankly most of the DEI programs I’ve seen are essentially window-dressing to cover up the fact that the companies promoting them have and continue to be substantially inequitable. And that kind of nonsense gives seeming legitimacy to Republicans complaining about “DEI”, which of course they then turn into a broad brush to paint anything they don’t like.
There is no tap-dancing through that semantic minefield without losing a foot regardless of how careful one is. Biden’s selection of a Black female jurist was part of the qualifications in making the Supreme Court at least vaguely representative of the population and giving a perspective that the court has been sorely lacking, and that it also appealed to a key demographic is scarcely pandering compared to all of the pandering the GOP does to White Christian Nationalists and worse. That he also selected an eminently qualified and experienced jurist who also met those characteristics demonstrates that consideration for diversity does not have to be a compromise.
But let’s be honest; Biden could have nominated Jeff Sessions for a Supreme Court justice and Republicans would have criticized him for being ‘Elfist’. There is literally no point in trying to avoid saying something just because Republicans will be critical and obstructive, because this is literally all that remains of whatever guiding principles they once had.
Publicly pledging to nominate a Black woman to the Supreme Court was the price for getting Rep. Jim Clyburn’s endorsement going into the South Carolina Democratic primary. That endorsement cinched South Carolina for him and changed the entire trajectory of his primary campaign, which was on life support at that point. You can come up with any language you want to that he “should” have said, but without saying what he did he would not be sitting in the White House.
Do you know who was moved to the front of the line because of their race and gender? Every presidential candidate for the first 200+ years of this country.
Oh, now you want things to be strictly merit-based? Seems like you’re a little late to this particular party.
The general ‘you’. Not directed at anyone in this thread.
Pence was a DEI hire, and I’m not even trying to be cute about it. He truly was.
Trump is not religious and he needed someone who would appeal to religious voters. I know that he found himself the darling of those groups eventually, but he didn’t start out that way. Here is a 2016 article talking about why Trump chose Pence.
His credentials in the eyes of grassroots conservative and evangelicals approach the unimpeachable, whereas the tea party-types and the religious right continue to view Trump with considerable suspicion. His mantra at the Capitol was that he was “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican — in that order.”
Trump picked someone who provided religious diversity, and Pence certainly fit that mold. It’s not really any different than choosing someone who is a certain race, or gender, or age.
It’s not different to people who think. But to other people, there’s no comparison between choosing a Regular Person–a straight (or at least closeted) white Christian male, and choosing an Inferior. By choosing an Inferior the chooser is demonstrating that they are Godless Librul Trash.
In looking at the right’s ‘DEI attack’ strategy we can’t expect logic and rationality to prevail. We have to recognize that we are looking at pure white-male-straight-Christian supremacism.
The supremacism side will always ignore the basic human psychology behind both affirmative action and its modern-day version, DEI: that is, that people tend to hire those they feel comfortable with. If 95% of those doing the hiring are straight white Christian males, then hiring only those with the same traits is feels natural and normal. Some of those 95% may be bigots aware of their own bigotry, but most of them are just people wanting to spend their days with people they ‘get’, people who won’t demand anything of them, people who ‘fit in’ effortlessly.
It’s this human trait–to hire or appoint those with whom we feel most comfortable–that DEI guidelines are designed to short circuit. (And of course it’s to all our benefit that it be short-circuited—because factually, the best candidates, those who have the capacity to contribute most in business, education, and politics, may well be those who fail the Supremacism requirements.)
To the Supremacists, the guidelines are designed to do one thing: to UNFAIRLY help the less-worthy (which by definition characterizes everyone who fails to be white + straight + Christian + male). To them, DEI = Unfair, Bad, and Wrong.
We have to allow for this mental pivot. When the right says “DEI” we have to recognize that they believe they are using a synonym for “unfair”—and reply accordingly.
The DEI attacks on Harris are empty and are without merit (as others here have explained). We should not give them much attention or rebuke. While we have the nation’s attention, we control the ball - let’s not make the mistake of going on defense every time some right-wing nitwit says something stupid, baseless, and wrong - that takes us off our game of prosecuting the case against Trump and his failed Presidency, his legal woes, and his odious personality. This DEI BS is a distraction and is simply more of the same MAGA war on “woke” (whatever they think that is).