In the fall, the Department of Education will mark 45 years since its inception, but that anniversary could be its last if Donald Trump gets his way. The federal agency is one of several he’s vowed to slash if reelected president.
“We’re going to end education coming out of Washington, D.C.,” he said in a campaign video last year. “We’re going to close it up — all those buildings all over the place and people that in many cases hate our children. We’re going to send it all back to the states.”
Well before the release of the draft platform, Republicans such as former Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky advocated for disbanding the Department of Education. Project 2025, a set of policy recommendations for a second Trump term released by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation not only supports eliminating the agency and removing LGBTQ+ protections and diversity curricula from schools but also privatizing education.
See: Every Federal social safety net program.
“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”
~ Davis X. Machina
Here in South Africa, one way companies tip the scales towards diversity in staffing is to begin much sooner- sponsoring minority students from high school through uni with post graduation service requirements. Don’t such scholarships exist in the US? Did Soul Man lie to me - or was that an institutional thing?
People have been posting as if companies are just passive beneficiaries of the education pipeline without a say, so I wondered.
I understood that from the start. I’m sort of surprised you didn’t come back and say, "but I didn’t write that. You literally did not write that. For the record I agree with you @Minj.
I noalso think that dei is also a way for companies to better tool their community outreach attempts, and better understand their customers. (all things being equal yadda) A staff of diverse people could reflect the community and make such a company better at serving the community and the community more likely to do business with them. I’d assume it would be better over all for business.
As for the magas? Name and shame if you’re the confrontational type. If they want to crow their hate, make them be very specific and let them know what you think of them.
Me? I mostly just cringe and talk shit about them later.
Lmao. Up through 1878, maybe. Half the boomers on this site went to super-elite universities without being white Protestants. The NHS consultant who my mum worked for as a secretary went to Cambridge, and he was a Muslim born on Zanzibar (nice guy, he let us stay in his holiday flat in Gran Canaria for free).
I seriously doubt a poor white kid from a flyover state is going to feel any more at home in Harvard, or be seem as ‘one of us’ by the elite because they happen to be the same colour. White students aren’t even the majority there anymore, AFAIK.
Anyway, I’ve already said I think legacy admissions are a bad thing, and I’ve never seen anyone on the right defend them.
I think the rhetoric is mostly ‘hiring people who are less qualified", and discriminating against white men to do it, and it has a substantial element of truth, especially post George Floyd. But if you want to discuss how much truth there is to conservatives’ claims about DEI, perhaps you should start a new thread?
Yeah I’d double-dispute that:
I dispute that that’s what DEI is, so cite please.
And I dispute that that’s all that MAGA rhetoric is alluding to.
In the case of things like the helicopter crash, the suggestion was that it’s dangerous to have “DEI hires” as pilots, ATCs etc. Being dangerous is a very different thing from not having a bonus credit in excel spreadsheets, it means you’re not adequately qualified.
(Of course everyone involved in said incident has been frustratingly cis white. But I’m sure they’ll find something to prove minorities’ inadequacy soon enough)
The very first sentence of this thread is alluding to right wing propaganda about what DEI is, so I do not believe I have gone off-topic.
But feel free to make whatever threads you like.
Add in some other things (no more Tuskegee Airman) and the dog-foghorn is clear.
For reasons being a pilot, among a number of other things, requires a white, cis, heterosexual, penis.
True. But if you hire people based on something other than how good they are at the job, then you will be reducing safety in safety-critical professions. Like I said, there’s no ‘qualified’ bar above which ability makes no difference.
The FAA internal communications directly said there was a tradeoff between increasing diversity, and predicted job performance/outcomes, and asked how much it was acceptable to decrease the latter in order to increase the former.
The pilot most likely to have been at the controls was a woman, who was fully trained and on her annual proficiency evaluation. But we don’t know what happened yet, so there’s no point speculating.
We have?
Are you alluding to Ms2001’s cite? Because I didn’t find it very compelling; there’s a lot of insinuations in the article but every time I click through to the source it turns out to not be anything near what the insinuation is suggesting (nice of them to include the sources though).
Nope. Being safe at your job is (way below) the minimum standard and beyond that there are many factors influencing an employer’s choice, e.g. the cut of one’s jib. That’s at the level where DEI comes in.
I missed that bit, but regardless it seems the FAA is short of ATCs which seems to actually have been the more critical factor here. Needing to drop standards to fill shortfall is definitely a danger that affects multiple industries.
As mentioned there has been plenty of speculation. I have received viral posts about how the pilot was trans, and then about how the pilot was black, before finally the real identity got revealed. And, oh yeah, there’s the thing of the president of the US blaming the crash on DEI policy.
The only thing that it’s “too soon” to do apparently, is call out the bullshit.
You believe that a “poor white kid from a flyover state” in modern-day US doesn’t benefit at all from systemic white privilege in how they’re perceived by “the elite”, just because the kid happens to be poor and non-coastal? Okaaaaaaaay.
Wow, okay, I see I should have been more explicit about the fact that my “all white Protestants at Prestige U up to 1978” scenario was an exaggerated extreme hypothetical example to better illustrate the effects of elite education acting as a proxy for race. It didn’t occur to me that anybody would naively interpret that hypothetical as a literal assertion about historical student demographics. Sorry, my bad for not spelling that out better.
Of course everybody knows that student bodies at actual elite US universities in the 1970s were not 100% white Protestant. (Although AFAICT they were on average still over four-fifths white in the '70s, and of course even more overwhelmingly so in previous decades.)
You believe that a “poor white kid from a flyover state” in modern-day US doesn’t get any benefit from systemic white privilege in how they’re perceived by “the elite”, just because the kid happens to be poor and non-coastal? Ooookaaaaaaaay.
I think you’re confusing the mixture of different kinds of privilege and disprivilege with the notion of disprivilege somehow erasing privilege, which isn’t how it works. A poor rural kid can still be a beneficiary of white privilege even while being disadvantaged by their lack of economic privilege.
(Sigh. It feels like all this stuff was until recently becoming better understood, and we didn’t need to spell out the basics in every discussion. But now that the Conformity, Inequity and Exclusion zealots are running amok in the government, all the tired “anti-woke” shibboleths are being dragged out and dusted off again.)
We have a reasonably difficult driving test here in the UK, and everyone legally on the road has met that minimum standard. Do you think every driver is equally likely to get in an accident?
Blowing up their pipeline by suddenly deciding students who’d spent their own time and money training for 4 years had no advantage in applying for jobs, and rejecting 85% of those graduating for spurious reasons, probably didn’t help. This happened at the end of 2013, but it takes at least 4 years for good candidates to be fully certified, and often 6 for less skilled ones, so problems take a while to become evident as existing ATCs retire. I daresay other bad decisions contributed, though - governments do love hiring freezes in the most necessary occupations.
Doesn’t mean we have to join in. Being better than the President of America is a low bar.
I thought you might say that, but there’s exaggerated and then there’s outright misleading. If language influences thought, so do (bad) analogies and misleading hypotheticals.
Google tells me the US was over 80% white in the 70s, so that is hardly a problem.
Affirmative action became common in US universities in the 1970s, and has continued in some form until now: today’s parents of college aged children, if they went to university, will have gone when affirmative action was already widely used and classes considerably diversified. That is why your hypothetical is inapplicable. The changing demographic makeup of the US in itself explains a good part of why more white students - of all religious backgrounds - are eligible for legacy admissions than those of other races/ethnicities.
I want to answer this, but I’m not sure if it really fits the thread. Perhaps it would be better to start a new one if you want to talk about privilege?
Right and would we call someone who has not even passed the test less qualified to drive?
And if someone is involved in an accident, do we jump to speculating that they only just passed their test?
There’s no way of threading the needle here of the MAGA rhetoric on DEI and how we treat and discuss the notion of being qualified in general.
Again, I would dispute that characterization. I downloaded the second paper and it’s a personality quiz. Yes, personality can be a factor in hiring, and I have had to do quizzes like that as part of the interview process too.
In our case though we are not speculating about the causes of the accident. I’m simply calling out as bullshit claims made without evidence. It’s bullshit even if it turns out to be adjacent to the truth down the line, because Trump’s literally just bullshitting*. But apparently it’s too soon to point out the emperor’s nakedness.
* On other forums, people have speculated that Trump has access to secret investigation information. But in my view, Trump has squandered the benefit of the doubt at least a thousand times.
Trump’s (once again) pulled this out his ass.
“Considerably” diversified isn’t very precise, though; it obscures the fact that college admissions, even in the 1970s, weren’t actually diversified to the point of canceling the effects of the previous centuries of segregation.
Entirely up to you if you want to answer or not, but I certainly think that the issue of traditional societal privilege of particular demographic groups is relevant to the topic of public policy regarding diversity, equity and inclusion.
