Reply to The future of DEI

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "The future of DEI"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Some of you will not believe me, but I served in a very high level detail in the federal gov't during 2022-23. As the detail was ending, I had a private exit conversation with a senate-confirmed agency head. When they asked what I was doing next, I replied that I had applied several times over the last few years for an SES role in their agency (and others) and this person said that although I was highly qualified, well known and liked etc., it was "highly likely" that I wasn't invited to interview because I am a white male. I couldn't believe they would actually say this aloud.

FWIW - I was literally abandoned as a teenager, finished high school while living on my own, and put myself through 5 years of undergrad (because I worked full time) and 6 years to get a PhD, also while working outside jobs. Sometimes, there were months on end where I didn't have a day off, but it's because of my skin color and the associated privilege that I was successful. Whatevs.

[/quote]

The response to your story from someone in the DEI field would be that throughout this you still benefitted from white privilege, which you did.

I get it though.  I'm a similar story of low-income white person who improved myself, etc.[/quote]

You’ve been brainwashed. No one is immune from privilege. If you are an American. Can walk. Are healthy. Have food. A family who loves you, you have something someone else does not. It is NOT limited to race, but these stupid programs aren’t nuanced enough for that kind of reflection.

Stop expecting people to feel bad. Society should not be encouraged to mope around full of guilt and whipping themselves all day. Probably explains the growing number of people offing themselves.

Just try to be nice and decent. And no, not as a mandate.
[/quote]

Ha.  I'm not brainwashed.  I am smart enough to know this country was built on the backs of free black labor and for generations the systems were set up to hoard wealth and opportunity with white people and the impacts of that are still in place all around us.  Why is that hard to understand.  Basic history.  Implying all Americans have the same level of privilege makes you sound super dumb.

However, I do not think people should mope around full of guilt and whipping themselves all day.  I'm a white person with a great life and let's see... zero of the white people I know are doing that so you seem to be worrying about something that's not actually happening.

Life is more complex than you're making it out to be.  [/quote]

It's a funny claim and historically wrong because for much of American history blacks were predominately concentrated in the South and in agriculture. They didn't build the railroads, work in the coal mines, staff the factories of the north until well into the 20th century, clear the vast forests of the midwest, break the sod on the prairies, etc cetera.

Black labor definitely played a role in helping create American prosperity but blacks did not "build" the country. If anything, how could they build the country [b]when they effectively weren't allowed to be anything more than the most basic field hand[/b] and housemaid for much of American history? Ultimately, America really was built by white people for white people, which ironically is also what a lot of CRT people like to say too without realizing the full extent of their message when they focus about the hostility towards black people (which is also true, white Americans have historically not wanted black people around and resented their presence).

As it is, life is definitely way more complicated than DEI proponents like you want to believe in your delusional woe is me mindset. I'm a historical realist. Not a cherry picker of facts to explain away your personal failures.

But I'll tell you who the real privileged people are these days. The young urban black men who get to run red lights while the police do nothing. [/quote]

The average black slave lived a similar life as a poor white sharecropper. Many people focus on a slave owner versus a slave, and don’t consider that slave owners were in the minority. There are numerous studies and papers about average calories, work hours etc and slaves truly had a very similar lifestyle as a poor white sharecropper. [b]Of course slaves were owned and didn’t have their freedom but did the average poor white person in the south have a lot of freedom?[/b]  But you’re not allowed to say any of this.

I think DEI has done more harm than good which is a shame. [/quote]

Are you serious? Was the average white a slave? [b]Yes the average white person in the south had a lot of freedom. [/b]They weren’t in chains. They could move west, north if they didn’t find opportunities south.
Maybe you don’t know what freedom is. [/quote]

Freedom is a funny word. What does it really mean? We largely define it nowadays as the freedom to make decisions and to own the outcomes of our free will. At the same time, historically there have also been other understanding of what freedom must mean. To take the case of the antebellum South, one of the weird and little mentioned ironies is that most slaves on the plantations were in some aspect physically better off than many poor whites because they had a better diet and better access to medical care. Shocking, perhaps, but slaves were extremely valuable, a single slave was the equivalent of owning a car today in terms of expense and cost. While there were certainly some exceptions, slaveowners still had a distinct financial interest in ensuring that their slaves survived and were healthy enough to be productive in the fields. Slaveowners were also the better off segment of Southern society and often had a moral, if paternalistic, attitude towards the welfare of their slaves. By contrast, many poor whites in the South lived lives of abject poverty and malnutrition due to poor diets and lack of nutrients. People today may like to look at photos of the old slave cabins and be appalled at how basic they are, while ignoring that poor whites had similar type housing and sometimes even worse. The South outside the plantations was really very, very poor, much poorer than the North, an economic factor that had some Southerners like Hinton Helper writing a book about it in the 1850s and blaming it on the existence of slavery.

Still, that doesn't preclude the point you made and which is absolutely right, at least poor whites had ownership of their actions and could make decisions that slaves could not, and poor whites were also not in danger of seeing families split up against their will and children and/or spouses sold away. The latter factor was probably the one slaves cared about the most, and was one of the greatest prizes of freedom.

But with freedom, the ex-slaves suddenly also had the freedom to take care of themselves, which didn't always work out so well. So it's not surprising that a popular theme in the interviews with the ex-slaves in the 1920s and 1930s was of how the old masters and mistresses "took care" of them and they didn't have to worry about food etc. Mind you, it was against the backdrop of the Depression and the South was severely affected by it, both black and white. But it does show how in modern times, when the basic staples of existence are effectively guaranteed or easily obtainable one way or another - decent enough housing, plenty of food etc, then the concept of freedom becomes defined less by the ability to act on your decisions than the difference in outcomes between your decisions and others. And therein lies the bitterness of today's struggles over the meaning of freedom. [/quote]

I don’t think white sharecroppers and indentured servants were treated as badly as black slaves - though they were not treated well and from a practical perspective were treated so badly that [b]the differences may not matter except in an academic discussion.[/b]

Not all whites, and certainly not all whites in the south, benefitted from slavery.  Imagine what would happen now to labor prices if those with the capital and means of production began importing free labor?

Slavery was bad for everyone except slave owners (and Wall Street/commodity traders/industrialists, but that’s for another time).  It was exceptionally good for slave owners.  That’s why they were so bent out of shape at the idea of slavery ending.  [/quote]

You can't possibly be saying this with a straight face. It's like, would you rather just be poor, or would you rather be poor and be kidnapped, separated from your family and repeatedly brutalized and raped? I guess it only matters from an academic perspective  :roll: [/quote]

I don’t think you have a great perspective on the plight of the poor in the west from the fall of the Roman Empire until after WWII.  There were many periods of time that “separated from your family and repeatedly brutalized and raped” was exactly the situation.  The distinction is that actually not being paid and being bought and sold is worse than being paid basically nothing and having no freedom due to circumstances.  But, if you’re actually in the situation it would seem hard to find one situation “preferable”.  In fact, one of the biggest motivations for the dirt poor white southerner to support the institution of slavery and the confederacy was the existential fear that freed blacks would then be “above” them in society.  So an ideology of white supremacy was advanced.  Ultimately it was the southern landowners who owned both the slaves, the contracts for indentured servants, and the leases for land the sharecroppers worked.  They essentially created this exploitative caste system which they dominated and it served their interests for everyone essentially to be subjugated (and fighting) within it.  So, slavery was worse because of the violation of natural right to be free - but rape, abuse, forced eviction, coercive labor, etc were all faced by the bottom rung of society for much of human history.

[/quote]

The notion that the experience of white indentured servants was the same as that of black enslaved people is a white nationalist myth. It's true that the experience of poor whites was really bad, but for so many reasons, the oppression of black enslaved people was so much worse.

"Irish historians widely agree that the treatment of indentured servants was extremely violent and unjust. That said, they also agree it is a distortion of the stories of the thousands of servants to inaccurately equate their conditions with those of Africans subjected to chattel slavery."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/18/fact-check-irish-were-indentured-servants-not-slaves/3198590001/
[/quote]

It’s not a white nationalist myth that the plight of the dirt poor whites and slaves were both so bad, actually debating the differences is a foolish exercise.  Yea, obviously being owned is a worse plight - but that fact doesn’t really matter unless you are fixated on slavery without the contributory context of the entirety of human history.  Getting the toe nails ripped off 10 toes is worse than getting them ripped off 9 toes, but who cares?  It certainly wasn’t a “privilege” to have 9 toe nails ripped off.

The retrospective victim Olympics is the problem.  It’s obfuscating contemporary discussions of how to improve society and leads to a ridiculous circus like DEI.

Historically speaking, life was cruel for a massive portion of the population.  The owners of capital and means of production were brutal.  The end of this dynamic was within our parents and grandparents lifetimes.

If you want to look at how this brutality manifests itself in the inequities of today, you can draw straight lines between those who were on the winning side of the Norman Conquest of GB, or any of the various civil wars of the British isles, and hold the wealth and power today and those who were on the losing side of those conflicts and ended up poor in America.

Yes, Slavery also created this dynamic but looking at the history of America and its embedded inequities by only looking at the legacy of slavery is a woefully narrow aperture to analyze the complexities of American history and its relationship with the colonial powers.

No one looks at the white factory worker in Baltimore as having a “privilege” over the white share cropper in the Deep South… but is quick to point out a privilege that exists between the white sharecropper and the slave.  It is an incredibly myopic view of history.

The current movement has basically looked at it and said “well slavery was worst so that’s all we will focus on”.  And it’s just foolish.[/quote]

+1 You're right. Unfortunately, this requires reading and thinking. The attention span of the average American is shrinking by the minute. There's a reason short catchphrases are so successful. [/quote]

The arguments you're making are exclusively made by people opposing anti-racism. Not by historians, who overwhelmingly disagree with you.[/quote]

I am amused by these variants of "my experts!" without really understanding the role of experts and what they do. Historians are traditionally a contrarian group of people strongly divided by views and opinions. Since someone brought up the 1619 project, it was not gospel and it was hugely controversial and a number of prominent historians joined forces and wrote a series of well-documented rebuttals in the World Wide Socialist (of all places) website. Including famous American historians like Gordon Wood, who certainly is among the [i]most famous [/i] American historians. By contrast, the 1619 essays were primarily not written by trained historians, nor was the editor herself any kind of historian, but a journalist. So who would be the "historian" and "expert" here?

Still, we are getting away from the topic of this thread and the topic is becoming more emotional rather than rational, DEI is fading out, as it was always doomed to eventually, because the three principles themselves: diversity, equity and inclusion, are contradictory in real life, offering little more than a catchy phrase without meaning very much, while at the same time acting as a red herring - its sole function is to promote black people, it was not and never about any other races or ethnicities. In practice it did become a new kind of ideology, based on belief rather than truth, and its byproduct was to elevate unqualified people into higher roles, like Claudine Gay of Harvard. Phrases like institutional racism is also falling away once it became clear there is 1) no agreement to what it really means, 2) it was a delusional mechanism by which people could avoid blaming their personal limitations and failures on themselves but deflecting it on others and allowing themselves to think they had no control over their fate. It's convenient to blame the limited outcomes of a poor urban black man on some kind of structural hypothetical racism despite the absence of any actual legal or even cultural racism, in order to keep justifying the failures of his actions. It didn't help that the staunchest supporters of DEI and institutional racism beliefs were people like the aforementioned Claudine Gay, who turned out to be the child of privilege herself, reminding everyone that despite all the claims of equity and inclusion, virtually all the benefits of DEI have accrued to a small sliver of already privileged black Americans. As such, it is not surprising that it is this group that is most bitter about the prospects of DEI retreating.[/quote]

+1 [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics