The image above is from the Tesla careers site. Oddly enough they’ve got a strong emphasis on diversity in their recruiting.

It’s pretty obvious from folks throwing around the acronym DEI that it’s become the new “polite” way to say the N word. Even though statistics show that the folks who benefit most from DEI hiring practices are white women.

There’s a myth that DEI policies result in hiring less qualified folks. There is no evidence of that. It really results more in not hiring an underqualified white person just because they’re white.

And there’s further concern that it is actively prejudicial against white people. Also not true. But let’s review the issues.

Whites enslaved black people for centuries. The USA called itself “the land of the free” even while continuing the practice of slavery.

The USA ended slavery finally in 1865 after much of the rest of the world had already done so. And it’s only within the last 70 years that we gave blacks civil rights and abolished the whites-only drinking fountains, bathrooms, lunch counters, and many other forms of legal prejudice.

Now we put our thumb gently on the scale to try to give POC a fair chance at climbing out of the hole we put them in. A DEI policy (or previously Affirmative Action) is not perfect by any stretch but can you think of anything better? Is “do nothing” the right way to respond to centuries of injury? We want POC to have jobs and contribute to society, don’t we? DEI is really just leveling the playing field, not tilting it in favor of POC.