Calling All White People, Part 65
TODAY’S EPISODE: Diversity efforts deserve more commitment and less indifference
I’m not saying that people are simply heaving a collective yawn at the dismantling of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts—if they notice their dwindling presence and imminent death at all—but I’m…
…yeah, I’m saying it. That’s exactly what I’m saying.
I see some of my fellow white people bemoan the way DEI is being shoved to the side, but by and large, I feel like it is getting an indifferent wave goodbye faster than Black Lives Matter did once everyone decided it was too much work to keep working at ensuring that Black lives did, indeed, matter as much as white ones (hint: they still don’t, societally speaking, so yeah, we’ve bailed on that way too early).
Legislatures across the country are literally banning DEI efforts. Saying you can’t have programs that seek to actually promote equity and inclusion. I mean, it’s not surprising to see businesses half-ass their DEI efforts or abandon them, and yes the programs are often problematic and ineffective (as Shay herself addressed not so long ago here). But Republicans still see DEI as enough of a threat, even when half-assed, to ban it.
And the response of most progressive white people seems to be, “Oh, well, we tried.”
Can we get a little more energy over people just throwing up their hands and essentially saying, “yeah, OK, let’s just go back to accepting white privilege status quo” or, worse yet, being blasé about politicians literally enshrining white supremacy in all our institutions? Can we? Pretty please with sugar on top?
I realize that this isn’t our country’s first rodeo on this front. I’m 56 now and grew up with programs to try to diversify things more in colleges and workplaces, and so I’ve been hearing fellow white people complain about “quotas” for decades. Never mind that these quotas, by and large, never existed and even in the rare cases they might have, they were rarely met. I have worked in lots of offices in a “professional” career over several decades. You know the only diversity I’ve ever seen that was on point in any of my workplaces? Women. Plenty of places I’ve worked had women represented at levels commensurate with their percentage of the population. That’s it.
You know what I’ve not ever seen? Non-white people at anywhere near their percentage of the general population. I’ve barely seen them at all. Yes, a couple workplaces did have multiple Black faces in someplace other than the mail room. Yes, I’ve seen a smattering of Asians, Latinos, and more. But barely a sprinkling compared to all that white. The only racial representation I’ve experienced that came close to matching the population breakdowns by race was in my high school student body—and even it managed to fail spectacularly on the Latino front, despite Mexicans being a rather significant part of the population of my city.
I’ve never worked in an office nor attended a university class that wasn’t overwhelmingly pale.
We see prospective white college students complain about being beat out for spots at universities because of quotas or DEI yet they can’t point to any proof it happened. They just say it and assume it and lots of other people eat it up. Never mind that they are in a competitive playing field where most people in general get passed up, and they were mostly beat out by white people or Asian people. Yet they make out like Black people with crappy grades are being pushed ahead of them. Harvard has one of the more diverse campuses around, surprisingly, and around 14% of the student body is Black. Which is (drum roll please)…around the actual percentage of Black people in the country. If you think with the number of applications they get that they have to settle for Black people who barely passed high school, then you certainly aren’t smart enough to go to Harvard.
The point is that for something like 70 or 80 years now, we’ve periodically tried to shake things up and loosen the chokehold that white people have on the best spots. White people still mostly get the best spots, because white people hold most of the best spots and give positions and promotions to fellow white people. And so white people—many of them undeserving, in my experience—end up taking up more of the space than they deserve.
DEI efforts in recent years might have sucked mostly, but the answer is not to let Republicans ban them or for us to give up on them. What needs to be done is to take them more seriously and do more to take prejudices out of the hiring and promotion process. You know, the hard work. We keep trying to fix things quickly and then give up when that obviously idiotic approach doesn’t work. Hard problems deserve hard work. Instead of giving up, why don’t we actually start doing that hard work? You know, instead of just shrugging as we give up yet again.
[To find other installments of “Calling All White People,” click here]
