Thanks again for continuing this conversation! I'm enjoying it. Also, can you recommend me a book or two to read on this subject? Thanks in advance.

>Since reparations will likely never happen or even start to happen, then concessions to that fact (like affirmative action) amount to a drop in the bucket. That's why it's disingenuous to point out the fire chief's sexual orientation and people hired as part of affirmative action in LA's hiring practices, because the injustices against them and their ancestors is far greater but left out of the conversation.

This is sort of like the concept of "original sin", isn't it? The notion that certain people have a debt that is so big that it is impossible to ever be paid back, and so they must forever remain burdened with the guilt of the sin that their ancestors committed. The scale can never be zeroed. The guilt can never go away. The transgression can never be forgiven, because the effects linger down to our day.

And this is a good example of that. You say it's disingenuous to point out the role that DEI played in LA's fire planning, prevention, and response, because of an unpaid debt that happened centuries ago. Is the concept of this "unpaid debt" a golden, reusable "get-out-of-jail-free" card that means that DEI can never be criticized?

Given a different disaster, unrelated to the LA fires, we could imagine this conversation: "Sure, we hired the wrong person for the job, but as X people, we owe an everlasting debt to the Y community for hundreds of years of suffering, so don't mourn for what you lost, it's just a drop in the bucket compared to what our ancestors did".

I'm being overly dramatic, but only half so, because this, to me, actually sounds like something someone might say.

In the case of the LA fires, and for the additional reasons you've given, I agree, DEI was not to blame and is being used as a scapegoat. I wonder, if the fire chief were instead a straight white male, and if there was no firefighter that "looked like you" but instead, was capable of saving your life, would people still have blamed DEI, or would they instead shift their focus towards the "real problems" that you mentioned? Perhaps if these people weren't in these highly visible positions to begin with, DEI would not have been undermined as it was.

>A black woman may want to achieve success on her own merits, not because of her identity. When reviewing her resume against a number of white men for example, one way to make it equitable would be to remove race and gender from the application....So we try to be impartial the best we can, while also weighing the needs of the community, such as having more black women represented in our company to make up for the years when they weren't.

That last sentence seems to be completely at odds with the first. If you give preferential treatment to black women to make up for "years" of this type of original sin, you are no longer allowing this person to succeed on her own merits. Imagine that you let this black woman see all the metrics you used to make the decision to hire her, and you showed her the section marked "We need more black women in our company in order to atone for the sins of the past". Do you think she would still feel confident that she was the best person for the job? I think she might sooner feel insulted by 'the soft bigotry of low expectations'.

Merit based is merit based. It should be simple, self-explanatory. A test score, credentials, years of experience, that sort of thing.

>I see how this can be confusing. How is it that giving her this preferential treatment, without specifically mentioning that she's a woman or why I incorporate that into my behavior, is somehow woke? Because through my actions, she can see that I identified the injustice at play and am working towards healing it. Whereas telling her that I'm doing it solely because she is...