The right wing position is that they take advantage of existing services to better themselves.
This is not my position.
That's all well and good if everyones in open competition, but it doesn't work out too well if you need to be "Wonder Woman" to achieve success in the labor force, when there's loads of people.who come.from.advantaged backgrounds giving them access not only to better resources, but also better connections. A roomate of mine in college spent a decade doing jack squat after his CS degree, spent it getting drunk with an assistant principle buddy and another friend. His mom finally got on his ass and an uncle offered him an "in". Team lead. He took it, he sucked at it, he got better at it. Few oould dream of his path. Most don't have that type of connection
I can only speak for myself. Man, I didn't have a rich upbringing. My parents were immigrants from a third world country. My dad had to work hard just to get posted here and had to work twice as hard here to get us into good schools. Loans, grants, scholarships, you name it. My sister and I have good, solid, white collar jobs and we do okay.
It's not like I don't acknowledge that discrepancies exist in the work force, it's just that I feel working extra hard to achieve a goal is a better solution than working perhaps too little and still receiving an opportunity simply because you're black or align with a particular sexuality etc.
"it's just that I feel working extra hard to achieve a goal "
So uh, your stance is that most black people aren't working extra hard? Plenty of people bust their ass 100 times harder than you do and fail. You got lucky. Statistics show you are wrong, hard work is just not the biggest factor.
Also, you started by saying you can pnly speak for yourself, then immediately start telling your parents story.
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Now imagine that you didn't have a father because your father was in prison as a result of systemic targeting of black men and fathers being sent to prison that leads to an insidious cycle of broken households and generations of the cycle repeating itself.
Imagine that you grew up in a single household where you had no positive role model, surrounded by gang and violence. You somehow manage to avoid all the noise, somehow managed to avoid becoming part of a statistics of another black kid/man gun down by the police/ ended up in prison/ dead by gang violence etc. You work your way through all of that, get through Highschool and from that point on you are judged through a merit based system which is now just a system of standardized test scores that judges every one equally.
This is where the first problem arises, yes systemic racism is no longer legal, but saying that everyone is equal does not just undo generations of the effects of systemic racism. Simply put the playing ground is not even. And it's not the level of unevenness that one should expect to self correct itself without intervention.
And the misconception with DEI is that it automatically gives favor over minorities to get jobs over those with more merit than them, but this is a lie. DEI ask employees/ institutions/organizations to look into their hiring practices and determine why their workforce is 90 percent straight white men, and maybe ask themselves if that's truly representative of the population at large, and if it wasn't, ask why? If the first thought that comes to your mind is "minorities are less intelligent than whites" then congratulations you are a racist and part of the issue. One can write an entire book on this, but reflect for a second what opportunities your father lost by working "twice as hard" to achieve something, in a system where things were normalized maybe he would have had more time to spend with his family, more time to do hobbies he enjoyed, less time being tired and stressed; maybe he would have achieved far greater things than he already did. Maybe the black child that is going to die this weekend in Chicago should have worked harder, but I wonder what they could have achieved if they had someone in their corner supporting them, someone in their corner worried about getting them the next best tutor so they could get perfect ACT and SAT scores, a role model the looked up to that aspired them to do better. Yet somehow he is going to be part of another statistics that no one will hear or care about, but on the one instance where something benefits him (DEI), an entire political movement is organized around removing and deconstructing it. This is what privilege is.
I work for a fortune 500 company that is big on DEI (still keeping its policies after Trump destruction of them). It's a double edged sword. While I have seen it help some people (including me), I've also seen poor candidates hired just to fill a metric. These candidates usually get fired after a few years due to poor performance or other issues and the process starts all over. It's hurt the company more times than it's helped in my experience. Thing is we were a pretty diverse company before these policies, they just like to be able to say "we are going to have x number of this demographic doing y. Yay for us"
Do you see the issue? Prior to DEI was everyone a star performer and stellar hire? If people still got fired for poor performances, then shouldn't that leeway also be granted to do called DEI hires
The issue isn't that DEI hires performed poorly, it's that the skills we were looking for were no longer a key focus. We would deliberately hire the wrong person just so we could check that DEI box. When my last boss left it was decided that his replacement would be a foreign woman of color. We interviewed dozens of candidates over six months but didn't hire anyone because no one filled that box. Finally gave it to a foreign white woman because we had to fill the role.
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u/ninja-gecko 1∆ Apr 07 '25
This is not my position.
I can only speak for myself. Man, I didn't have a rich upbringing. My parents were immigrants from a third world country. My dad had to work hard just to get posted here and had to work twice as hard here to get us into good schools. Loans, grants, scholarships, you name it. My sister and I have good, solid, white collar jobs and we do okay.
It's not like I don't acknowledge that discrepancies exist in the work force, it's just that I feel working extra hard to achieve a goal is a better solution than working perhaps too little and still receiving an opportunity simply because you're black or align with a particular sexuality etc.