Corporate Diversity

[Jazzy]

Advocates of diversity efforts are steeling themselves for a fight this year as a growing number of lawsuits take aim at programs intended to advance racial equity in the corporate world.

Lawsuits making their way through the courts have targeted prominent companies and a wide array of diversity initiatives, including fellowships, hiring goals, anti-bias training and contract programs for minority or women-owned businesses. Most have been filed by conservative activists who have been encouraged by the Supreme Court’s June ruling ending affirmative action in college admissions and are seeking to set a similar precedent in the workplace.

Full article

---

Quick guide: "Equity" is where people get the job/deal/circumstance because they are in a "minority group". No skill, talent, or anything special is required.

"Equality" is giving an equal opportunity for all to take place. If you're not good enough, you don't get the prize.

What are your thoughts on this?

 

[Lamb]

It's racist to hire someone because of the color of his skin.

If there were two candidates who were looking to be hired to be a pilot, one having 20 years experience, the other failed his test, but got passed through because he was a certain color. Which would you want to pilot your plane?

 

[Josiah]

Full article

---

Quick guide: "Equity" is where people get the job/deal/circumstance because they are in a "minority group". No skill, talent, or anything special is required.

"Equality" is giving an equal opportunity for all to take place. If you're not good enough, you don't get the prize.

What are your thoughts on this?

I stand with Rev. Dr. MARTIN LUTHER King, Jr.

His "dream" is that our society will pay no attention to and give ZERO importance to outward things such as race, color, gender, ethnicity.... and instead of that, in lieu of that, in place of that will give all attention to CHARACTER and integrity.

Liberals INSIST on countering MLK's dream, keeping it from progressing and happening. They (and their puppets - the press, often our universities) are OBSESSED with skin color, gender, ethnicity and are very, very careful to never so much as mention character (they won't even use that horrible, politically incorrect, despicable word). They are at war with King's dream... they are working HARD to keep it from being realized. When Obama ran for president, everyone STRESSED his skin color (HE didn't, to his credit) going on and on and on and on about his skin color and NEVER permitting anyone to even speak of character. When Hilary Clinton ran for president, she (and everyone else) went on and on and on and on about her gender... never permitting even the word character.

All this "diversity" (rather than character) emphasis is harmful.
What we need is blindness to race, color, gender, ethnicity in hiring, etc. etc.
What SHOULD matter is character.


- Josiah


PS. Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King's father was also an important Baptist minister with a doctorate. When studying for that degree, he became such a great admirer of Martin Luther that he legally changed his name to that of the great reformer and theologian. And at the same time, legally changed the name of his then young son.



,

 

[tango]

The trouble with equality is that equality of opportunity isn't always as easy as it's made out to be. We start with the idea that "all men are created equal" but even that assumption is fatally flawed. The child born to a drug-addicted mother who continues to use drugs during her pregnancy is not equal in very many ways to the child born to a mother who took whatever steps she had available to watch her diet and make sure the baby growing inside her was as well nourished as she could manage. When the cards are stacked against some right from the start it's easy to see why there's a push to try and balance things later in life.

The trouble with equity is that most attempts to balance things later in life simply introduce artificial advantages to people who shouldn't necessarily be receiving them. If you can't run fast you're not going to succeed as a sprinter. It doesn't matter whether the reason you can't run is because you never trained, because you trained hard but didn't have the lung capacity to achieve the fastest speeds, or because you were born without legs - the fact remains that elite sprinters need to be able to, you know, sprint.

Where requirements for a job are fairly non-specific, where more or less anybody could do the job, it arguably makes less difference what criteria is used to select which of the many applications is offered the job. Where specific levels of skill and/or education are required it makes no sense to seek diversity above ability. I don't want someone who is partially sighted piloting my plane, or performing my surgery, or whatever else requires them to be able to see clearly.

If we try to fix things by making sure that "enough" people from different groups are hired in professional roles, the obvious question would be why such people wouldn't be hired based on their merits. If they lack merit, maybe we should start there rather than trying to force companies to hire inferior staff. So the question then becomes one of why the "minority" groups aren't doing well at university, which leads to either an expectation that universities will admit inferior candidates or the question of why those candidates wouldn't qualify under their own merits. That in turn looks at the education system for younger and younger people.

Perhaps if we solved the problem at its root we'd have fewer issues with the branches.

 

[Albion]

The "trouble" with Equity is that it's a propaganda word, chosen for its vagueness but also for its similarity to Equality which sounds and looks similar while not carrying the same meaning.

If someone happens to notice that it actually isn't another way of saying Equality, the advocates for Equity turn to the word's actual meaning and say that it means that they are for fairness (and not necessarily equal treatment)...but at the same time, they are also the ones who get to define what's fair!

To be an advocate for Equality on the other hand is not to be in favor of whatever the user chooses to mean by the term.

 

[tango]

The "trouble" with Equity is that it's a propaganda word, chosen for its vagueness but also for its similarity to Equality which sounds and looks similar while not carrying the same meaning.

If someone happens to notice that it actually isn't another way of saying Equality, the advocates for Equity turn to the word's actual meaning and say that it means that they are for fairness (and not necessarily equal treatment)...but at the same time, they are also the ones who get to define what's fair!

To be an advocate for Equality on the other hand is not to be in favor of whatever the user chooses to mean by the term.

Equity can be a propaganda word, some say it attempts to create equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity. Even the term "equality" can be misused - if someone advocates for equality they might be seeking equal opportunities, equal outcomes or something else. If a population is 90% white and 10% black then, all else being comparable, it wouldn't represent any useful version of equality to demand equal numbers of white and black employees in a company.

 

[Albion]

Equity can be a propaganda word,

Well, of course, it's true that the word is a legitimate word with a particular meaning. However, the reality is that it has been adopted by a certain political faction in order to make its objectives seem admirable and just. More specifically, these people want to be understood as saying that they are for equality -- a cherished concept in American life -- without actually being for equality.

some say it attempts to create equality of outcome rather than equality of opportunity.

They may say that, but it's not what they are striving to accomplish.

... if someone advocates for equality they might be seeking equal opportunities, equal outcomes or something else.

In all those instances, the reference is to something that actually is a matter of "equal-ness." But that is not what they mean by using the term Equity. If what they want was equality of outcome--and if such a thing were possible in the particular venture under consideration--they would have no reason to find and then employ a word other than equality!