I’ve started a few comments in response to this but in the end I’m flabbergasted. Calling Jackie Robinson a “DEI hire” is, in addiction to its rank condescension, maybe just of a piece with other increasingly common claims about the 1940s (the institutional erasure of the Soviets from the European war effort, all kinds of distortions of the Nazi war program, the idea that Americans joined the war to liberate the Jews of Europe), the historical revisionism that gets ever easier as those who were there die out. But Jesus this one grates the ear.
It's of a pattern where history gets hijacked in order to further contemporary political causes. Look at the reductionist narrative that the Civil War was virtuous Northerners battling to abolish slavery when the truth is that history is far more complicated.
It has gone so far in the other direction - “the war was won solely by those fighting in the East” - that somebody recently felt the need to write an entire book debunking the idea: How the War Was Won.
The devastation in the East was certainly not known for a long time, but our ally had no interest in that being known, given that casualties were due to a pincer effect of Soviet and Nazi: the opening of archives finally yields a book like Bloodlands (controversial nonetheless). I was 52 years old when I heard what happened to Belarus, for instance.
I’m in my 70s and it seems to me that in school we never got to 20th century history which would have been useful knowledge. We learned about the early explorers many times. I do not know what happened to Belarus. Perhaps schools are currently teaching better history.
To locate myself in time and space: my high school could have been the inspiration for that in "Dazed and Confused".
In a history class, it was working through the textbook. We would start off well enough but by the end of the semester we were never near the end, usually missing the last quarter of the book. Thus: I remember a year that started with the Pilgrims or thereabouts and was supposed to wind up with the Civil War.
We didn't even get to the Mexican War. We didn't even get to the Mexican War in my middle school Texas history class haha.
Had we been aiming for WW1, for instance, we probably would have run aground in the Gilded Age.
I don't think this happens anymore, due to curricular strictness.
Still, I'm fairly certain that given a choice, forward or backward, I'd go for the history class taught in the 50s versus the one taught now (if general knowledge is the aim).
Much like if you've got two sets of encyclopedias, and are deliberating which one to keep and which to Goodwill - the earlier edition definitely has the edge. 1960s Britannicas are fine, but no later.
As to school, just a hunch based on the recollections of older relatives, whose impressions of high school are very different. The Exeter-educated relative, appears to have gotten a better college education there, than we did at actual college.
An in-law likes has mentioned a couple of times that she did a research project on plate tectonics in her small town school. She tells this with a tinge of “I was the first to know about plate tectonics, my teacher hadn’t heard about it”, a bit of a nod to the provincial. She is pleased to think she’s an early adopter, plate tectonics wise.
My reaction to her story is basically - you did a research project in school?!
A few months ago the internet was treated to Ray Manzarek’s old homework.
My response to that was: I learned who George Washington was, I know that guy!
We made so many maps of the explorers' routes! Mapping was huge back in the day. Oddly it was not something that stuck, in terms of my knowing where things were later on.
I'm having a little trouble understanding these two thoughts in relation to each other. Are you saying that the Soviets weren't the core factor in the Allies winning World War II because...a lot more people died there than died in other theaters of the war? Huh?
I like "complaining to the refs" but this works as well.
"This is part of why liberalism is so impotent in the present moment, because liberals cannot conceive of a vision of politics that isn’t fundamentally about asking Big Mommy to come spank the bad guys."
Ezra Klein likes to say that Republicans are too autocratic and Democrats are too bureaucratic. This obsession with procedure, rules and policies is a really depressing way to approach politics. In some ways I respect MAGA more for just doing what they think is right even though it's usually terrible.
I am wary of the "ends justify the means" approach on both ends of the political spectrum. But the Dems got accustomed to running to the refs (judiciary) in lieu of focusing on winning elections by widening the tent.
Robinson was drafted _despite_ his race. Isn't the central narrative that Robinson had to overcome the substantial amounts of racism present in society to land his contract?
By contrast affirmative actiion/DEI implies that he would have been drafted despite any shortcomings because of his race. How is the claim that Robinson is a DEI hire not a total inversion of history?
I thought Branch Rickey was the prime mover behind the Jackie Robinson story - not Jackie Robinson - except insofar as Robinson “did everything right”, including being very good at baseball though not in retrospect considered the best black player of the time. (Or even at the time.)
Rickey recognized the tremendous talent in the Negro League and wanted those players for his team. In that sense the entirety of the Negro League was "better than" in terms of their playing ability outweighing the racism of the day.
And Robinson himself had to be "better than" at a personal level because Rickey extracted a promise out of him to forego retaliation for the racist abuse that he suffered.
There were always forces in MLB that were trying to get around the gentleman's agreement to not sign black players. When managing in Baltimore, John McGraw tried signing a black player and pretending he was an Indian, which failed. By the time Rickey signed Robinson, a number of observers realized that the issue wasn't whether the color line would be broken, but when and by whom. Monte Irvin was a very common target of speculation as to who would break the color line, and allegedly Bill Veeck wanted to break the color line but was foiled (Veeck is famously full of shit; he probably wanted to break the color line but didn't do anything until signing Larry Doby after Robinson was a regular).
Not in a vacuum. Even Rickey had been in baseball for about 35 years and hadn’t made a move on it, though he had innovated in other (and often bad-for-baseball) ways when else created the farm system. There are reasons Robinson was signed in 1945 and not Oscar Charleston in 1925, even though Robinson was probably about half the ball player Charleston was.
So a lot more happened than “two guys got it done.”
I applied context. Your “got it done” statement added nothing—literally everyone knows that Rickey signed Robinson!—except trying to make yourself sound smart and snarky. The only person flying in his own mind palace is you; I’m merely a leftist baseball nerd who revels in these details.
Sometimes, “Wow, I did not know that! Thanks for the info!” works wonders.
“Cool history” was never going to be enough praise! Nonetheless I am actually interested in those details. Am related to a rightist baseball nerd, but one with too little patience to talk baseball with anyone, unless directly applied to, and on something very specific - and even then not very expansively.
Congrats, though, on managing to sound so smart - because it takes smarts surely to make dumb people think you’re holding two different opinions!
It really wasn’t. The offensiveness to you of “got it done” - seems to have gotten most of that impression done.
I will try again:
Cool and interesting history/background!
Still, one guy had to be comfortable with taking that stage, and another guy with putting him there. Right?
(Insert you explaining “wrong”, followed by new comment by me saying, sounds like Branch Rickey’s role was overstated in my mind, or the like. Or: sounds like there were earlier JR’s ready to take it on.)
Then I turn from phone amusement back to Covid, which in case anyone (else)has followed this far, is so far presenting as: a little dry upper chest cough; a feeling of needing to eat but not getting much nourishment from food; weak shaky legs, weakness generally.
I wasn’t offended at all by “get it done.” I merely thought it was empty and bewildering. And I didn’t say, “Wrong,” to your comment, either, because it wasn’t wrong, just empty and not meant to further any conversation.
You seem to be ascribing feelings to me that I’m not feeling, instead being of a bored guy talking baseball in between tedious tasks at work. You just misread something on the Internet. I’ve been on both sides of this exchange many times over the years. Just let it go, man.
Depending on when you date it to, the DEI period appears to coincide rather neatly with the de-integration of baseball in recent decades, actually :-).
A quick search suggests that baseball is plenty integrated; in fact, the large number of South American immigrants makes it more mixed than the United States as a whole. White people appear to be a majority, but a small one.
And of course, once upon a time they had enough for whole leagues, and towns had ball clubs.
In 2047 there will be an anniversary, if MLB is still around; I would think it won’t land *quite* the same way if the number of American black baseball players continues to decline, but YMMV.
"I simply do not understand the utility of this constant conflation of different ideas and programs."
Yes you do - its a rhetorical device to insist that DEI can't possibly have been in error or a bad idea because everything is DEI and every anti-racism advance in the past is due to DEI. We can't get rid of DEI because everything is DEI, and the only alternative is racism.
Its a feature, not a bug, that the conservatives say X, then progressives reflexively say Y. They are like two competing companies that, without negotiation, have a lighted on a market strategy that benefits them both to the detriment of the public. It's political parties as identities.
My new thought for the last few weeks is that people that vote on identity are the true "low information voters." They think of nothing of what they've been told, only that they've been told that position X affiliates them with the group of their preference. It does not matter how incoherent it is.
I think itʻs a low information concept to label one group "the true" anything, when the clear and obvious situation is that: we are surrounded on all sides by idiots.
Presumably it was phones and microplastics that turned humans into moderately high-functioning gibbons. MODERATELY
"When people say DEI, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, they’re referring to a profoundly 21st century school of corporate identity progressivism"
Unfortunately, it's even more complicated than that. "DEI" or the phrase "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" is (perhaps intentionally?) ambiguous. Often in practice, it *is* used to describe that particular school of 21st century progressivism, but other times, it's used far more literally.
Conservatives will equivocate by saying they want to eliminate DEI in the corporate sense in order to attack it in its more literal sense. On the flipside, progressives equivocate when they defend the corporate kind of DEI by appealing to the literal meaning of "DEI."
I have a friend who worked for a large corporate firm which has gone all in on DEI. He has a health condition and requested a reasonable accommodation, which was denied because his immedatiate boss, who has lost so many employees due to him being a complete jerk, didn't want to lose my friend. The boss is a classic "horrible boss" type and then engaged in 6 months of retaliation.
This uber DEI firm, when presented with the complaint and request for a transfer to another office on the other side of the country, doubled down and fired him. My friend kept documentation of the retaliation, so is in the process of settling for a very large check.
No one should trust claims of pro DEI anymore than we trust politicians to keep promises.
Someone shared a WSJ news article with me about Morgan Stanley's whiplash from their DEI craze and rapid reversal, and they're getting sued by both black and white employees. I want to see them lose to both groups simultaneously because it looks like they both got screwed.
Completely agree that it’s anachronistic and wrong to call Robinson a DEI hire, but I have to say: there’s no way a proponent of modern DEI practices would concede that “DEI hires” are less qualified than others. I feel like Freddie snuck in a tiny bit of the conservative redefinition of the term in the way he set up the contrast there.
If they aren’t less qualified than other candidates, aren’t they just regular hires? FdB is not pushing a conservative redefinition of the term, he is reminding us of the actual implications of the term.
The idea is the the people doing the DEI hiring have their own subconscious white supremacism to deal with, and the DEI policies only serve to counterbalance that bias. On occasion this may even be true.
I am skeptical. In practice affirmative action and DEI policies have produced racist nonsense such as the "personality scores" used to disqualify Asian applicants from colleges and universities like Harvard.
I see this as an unfortunate but somewhat natural result of attempts to conflate the highly defensible and often heroic (breaking the color barrier) with the much less so, i.e. affirmative action. Not so much a motte and bailey but a more of a post modern dodge. 'What is a keep anyway?'
Freddie is correct to distinguish between different concepts and histories but I think his commitment to defending old school affirmative action prevents him from getting to the heart of the issue. While corporate DEI is fundamentally about CYA and public relations, those that embrace this sort of thing do actually want to be able to engage in some rank, demographic balancing i.e. affirmative action. They want that because their DEI programs are ultimately measured based on workforce demographics. The challenge they inevitably run into is the pipeline problem that frustrates most efforts of this nature, which in turn creates pressure to do exactly what affirmative action's critics say is inevitable, that being hiring objectively less qualified people based on racial (or whatever other) considerations.
Now, do I think sports media personalities necessarily have a strong understanding of this? Of course not. They don't typically have a strong understanding of anything. But in light of the above it is no surprise that advocates of DEI and similar modern left of center approaches to dealing with racial inequality would want to cloak the dumb or harder to defend stuff (which, yes, in the 21st century, very much includes affirmative action) with all the good heroic stuff of the 20th century.
It’s the framing George Lakoff talked about. “Death Taxes,” “Right to Life.” Liberals adapt the terminology of their detractors; the incoherent language avoids challenging voters with an actual position that may cost votes, or worse, upset their status quo.
I don't really have to read this, but I do because I share the same disgust with liberals walking right into the narratives their opponents create for them.
But I was laughing out loud at the end of the first paragraph.
"...and liberals (being the feckless and lazy scolds they are) have decided to join them in doing so, to own Drumpf or whatever. Everything is stupid and I hate it here."
Yes! Why can’t they all work together, ever! Dems could be shocked at the crazy spending and help Reps root it out, Reps could agree that some immigrants are helpful and help Dems figure out a sane way to keep them.
I have to say, I was expecting much larger numbers.
"Shocked at the crazy spending" had me thinking of big-ticket items. But you could cut all that and nobody would notice or care except for the people directly involved; spending 32K commissioning a comic book is not meaningful to an organization that spends maybe five trillion dollars a year.
Some of those sound perfectly reasonable. Some don't. But all of them look small.
Thank you for this. I’m just spent with this revisionist history that progressives so reliably apply to every aspect of “good” history to further their questionable/dubious policies of today.
I take comfort in others being able to see it too.
I wonder if this very mechanism they so readily use actually inculcates them into believing that “nothing has changed”.
I think they’d probably best make Jackie Robinson a hard stop, year zero; and not go any further back into history.
For instance, they might discover that progressive-minded Southern ladies tended to found schools, often under the auspices of the church, specifically for blacks, in the wake of the Civil War. Is a hate fact like that DEI? You get into an Ourobouros situation there.
I helped interview groups to provide my company with "DEI" consulting, with the explicit internal understanding that this was an HR exercise, not an indoctrination for employees. Some of them were terrible (the D'Angelo/Kendi approach), with pre-packaged presentations to be used in a workshop setting. At the same time, my kids were doing social/emotional learning programs at their schools, with the majority being crap (including some harmful lessons like if you don't fit these negative gender stereotypes, you very well might be transgender) but some of it was good for kids to learn. I was pretty down on the whole effort.
Fortunately, we found an excellent consultant who was great in helping us update some of our policies and approaches with the goal of treating staff fairly and broadening our applicant pool for new hires.
Which is a long way of saying: what parts of the DEI agenda work? Proponents should highlight that while disengaging from the generic debate that champions or attacks these ideas as if they are one-size-fits-all concepts.
“Broadening the applicant pool” seems the most valid and common sense result. At level, it’s the aim of the movement. Add more diversity to the pool, increase the opportunity for hiring. To say some of these things aren’t needed seems to say there were just never any qualified minority/marginalized candidates throughout history.
The problem is Griggs v Duke Power. For 55 years, companies have needed some way to evaluate potential employees without real testing. Allow them to do testing without concern about disparate impact and there should be limited need for a college degree in many fields.
The value of a college degree has probably been fatally diluted anyway. Decades ago the average iq of a college grad was higher than the national average. Now? No difference.
I remember this stupid Twitter fight (but I repeat myself) where a manager was being attacked because they said they didn't give preference in hiring to under-represented minorities.
If I went on Twitter and said "yes, we give preference" that would be incredibly insulting to my employees. I'm going to say, loudly, that they're the best people for the job.
Yes: “we need to think clearly and argue effectively”. Partly the politicians are simplifying their arguments so us simple folk can understand and partly they are themselves pretty simple.
I did not hear what Nick Wright had to say, so I do not want to criticize, but I just cannot fathom someone saying that Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball is proof that DEI works. Robinson did not combat coded language and dog whistles. The racism he endured was quite overt. He received death threats. The 1940's and the 2010's-20's, simply put, were completely different times. I do not think any parallel or comparison between Robinson and current DEI hires can be made rationally.
On the larger issue, racism is buttressed by economics. There is a strain of racism, undoubtedly, that manifests itself outside of economic issues, but the type of racism we can combat is economically based. The problem is that DEI training does absolutely nothing to address these issues. The sessions I have attended have been fairly ridiculous, and employees often resent them. They probably stoke more ill will than they prevent. DEI hiring tends to take place at lower-level corporate positions. I remember when I was working at a medical center back in my 20's. The idea of quotas was never really institutionalized at entry-level positions, but only through the positions of janitors, couriers, chart clerks, receptionists, transport, etc. did the medical center meet its supposed quota. Surgeons? Administrators? Registered nurses? From the eye test--and as a courier I saw a lot of the complex--diversity was practically nonexistent.
If we want to do something meaningful to combat racism, then, we have to provide real opportunities for POC to receives strong education and then have good careers available for them. Of course, capitalism does not work that way, as the system needs most of its workers at the bottom who society can justify are there because they didn't work hard enough. So, the solution, then, has to be to introduce a severely modified form of capitalism where wealth is not concentrated among the few on the top. Without that--when everyone is fighting for their own share of the pie--racism provides the frustrated middle with easy scapegoats. It is very sad.
"...like all corporate efforts DEI fundamentally serves the needs of the corporation, and thus actual diversity, equity, and inclusion are secondary goals at best."
In my experience, the employees who really believe in this don't think it's corporate at all. In fact, they see corporations as one of the big baddies, and DEI initiatives as a "grass-roots" effort to keep those big baddies in line. It's a state university, so perhaps that's different. But they really do see this as them telling the institution how to "be better".
In a related note, when Trump started to cut funding to both the DOE and Libraries in general, the librarians where I work were almost completely focusing on the loss of DEI initiatives...despite the huge funding elephant in the room. They couldn't even be bothered with the gigantic economic impact of all of this.
I agree that there are employees and grad students who genuinely don’t see DEI as being corporate, but those people are marks. DEI initiatives, whether they are hiring a new DEI dean of your university, corporate workshops put on by HR, or whatever else, are designed to protect the institution from accusations of racism/sexism/whatever else, not to protect employees from racism/sexism/whatever else.
I don't think all of them are marks. Many of them are just falsifying their preferences (either consciously or unconsciously) because they know (again, either consciously or unconsciously) that doing so is the easiest self-defensive strategy. And then there's the small class of social climbers who can check the right identity boxes and say the right things in order to personally materially benefit from DEI.
That’s a great point, and demonstrated by both non-profits and tech companies getting revolutionary foment from internal DEI supporters.
It was a large scale attempt at entryism, a “third way”, if you will, of dealing with institutions (“wear them as a skin suit”). I’d say it’s failed spectacularly, and now the backlash of authoritarian federal government is even worse (see my “hold my beer” comment earlier).
I’ve started a few comments in response to this but in the end I’m flabbergasted. Calling Jackie Robinson a “DEI hire” is, in addiction to its rank condescension, maybe just of a piece with other increasingly common claims about the 1940s (the institutional erasure of the Soviets from the European war effort, all kinds of distortions of the Nazi war program, the idea that Americans joined the war to liberate the Jews of Europe), the historical revisionism that gets ever easier as those who were there die out. But Jesus this one grates the ear.
It's of a pattern where history gets hijacked in order to further contemporary political causes. Look at the reductionist narrative that the Civil War was virtuous Northerners battling to abolish slavery when the truth is that history is far more complicated.
The institutional erasure of the Soviets?!
It has gone so far in the other direction - “the war was won solely by those fighting in the East” - that somebody recently felt the need to write an entire book debunking the idea: How the War Was Won.
The devastation in the East was certainly not known for a long time, but our ally had no interest in that being known, given that casualties were due to a pincer effect of Soviet and Nazi: the opening of archives finally yields a book like Bloodlands (controversial nonetheless). I was 52 years old when I heard what happened to Belarus, for instance.
I’m in my 70s and it seems to me that in school we never got to 20th century history which would have been useful knowledge. We learned about the early explorers many times. I do not know what happened to Belarus. Perhaps schools are currently teaching better history.
To locate myself in time and space: my high school could have been the inspiration for that in "Dazed and Confused".
In a history class, it was working through the textbook. We would start off well enough but by the end of the semester we were never near the end, usually missing the last quarter of the book. Thus: I remember a year that started with the Pilgrims or thereabouts and was supposed to wind up with the Civil War.
We didn't even get to the Mexican War. We didn't even get to the Mexican War in my middle school Texas history class haha.
Had we been aiming for WW1, for instance, we probably would have run aground in the Gilded Age.
I don't think this happens anymore, due to curricular strictness.
Still, I'm fairly certain that given a choice, forward or backward, I'd go for the history class taught in the 50s versus the one taught now (if general knowledge is the aim).
Much like if you've got two sets of encyclopedias, and are deliberating which one to keep and which to Goodwill - the earlier edition definitely has the edge. 1960s Britannicas are fine, but no later.
Why do you believe that earlier classes / encyclopedias are better?
Small famil(ies). Lots of encyclopedias. One person tends to inherit all the books. Direct comp.
Makes sense. Better how?
As to school, just a hunch based on the recollections of older relatives, whose impressions of high school are very different. The Exeter-educated relative, appears to have gotten a better college education there, than we did at actual college.
An in-law likes has mentioned a couple of times that she did a research project on plate tectonics in her small town school. She tells this with a tinge of “I was the first to know about plate tectonics, my teacher hadn’t heard about it”, a bit of a nod to the provincial. She is pleased to think she’s an early adopter, plate tectonics wise.
My reaction to her story is basically - you did a research project in school?!
A few months ago the internet was treated to Ray Manzarek’s old homework.
My response to that was: I learned who George Washington was, I know that guy!
We made so many maps of the explorers' routes! Mapping was huge back in the day. Oddly it was not something that stuck, in terms of my knowing where things were later on.
I'm having a little trouble understanding these two thoughts in relation to each other. Are you saying that the Soviets weren't the core factor in the Allies winning World War II because...a lot more people died there than died in other theaters of the war? Huh?
I like "complaining to the refs" but this works as well.
"This is part of why liberalism is so impotent in the present moment, because liberals cannot conceive of a vision of politics that isn’t fundamentally about asking Big Mommy to come spank the bad guys."
Ezra Klein likes to say that Republicans are too autocratic and Democrats are too bureaucratic. This obsession with procedure, rules and policies is a really depressing way to approach politics. In some ways I respect MAGA more for just doing what they think is right even though it's usually terrible.
I am wary of the "ends justify the means" approach on both ends of the political spectrum. But the Dems got accustomed to running to the refs (judiciary) in lieu of focusing on winning elections by widening the tent.
Robinson was drafted _despite_ his race. Isn't the central narrative that Robinson had to overcome the substantial amounts of racism present in society to land his contract?
By contrast affirmative actiion/DEI implies that he would have been drafted despite any shortcomings because of his race. How is the claim that Robinson is a DEI hire not a total inversion of history?
I thought Branch Rickey was the prime mover behind the Jackie Robinson story - not Jackie Robinson - except insofar as Robinson “did everything right”, including being very good at baseball though not in retrospect considered the best black player of the time. (Or even at the time.)
Rickey recognized the tremendous talent in the Negro League and wanted those players for his team. In that sense the entirety of the Negro League was "better than" in terms of their playing ability outweighing the racism of the day.
And Robinson himself had to be "better than" at a personal level because Rickey extracted a promise out of him to forego retaliation for the racist abuse that he suffered.
There were always forces in MLB that were trying to get around the gentleman's agreement to not sign black players. When managing in Baltimore, John McGraw tried signing a black player and pretending he was an Indian, which failed. By the time Rickey signed Robinson, a number of observers realized that the issue wasn't whether the color line would be broken, but when and by whom. Monte Irvin was a very common target of speculation as to who would break the color line, and allegedly Bill Veeck wanted to break the color line but was foiled (Veeck is famously full of shit; he probably wanted to break the color line but didn't do anything until signing Larry Doby after Robinson was a regular).
Cool history to know.
Two guys got it done though.
Not in a vacuum. Even Rickey had been in baseball for about 35 years and hadn’t made a move on it, though he had innovated in other (and often bad-for-baseball) ways when else created the farm system. There are reasons Robinson was signed in 1945 and not Oscar Charleston in 1925, even though Robinson was probably about half the ball player Charleston was.
So a lot more happened than “two guys got it done.”
Sounds like the DOD needs a new page minimizing their contribution and upholding the others.
The alternative view, that it was just time, gives too much credit to the nation though, and probably ought to be memory holed.
Whatever. You do whatever you think makes you sound smart. Which, if you think I’m arguing for what you proposed, you most definitely are not.
I applied context. Your “got it done” statement added nothing—literally everyone knows that Rickey signed Robinson!—except trying to make yourself sound smart and snarky. The only person flying in his own mind palace is you; I’m merely a leftist baseball nerd who revels in these details.
Sometimes, “Wow, I did not know that! Thanks for the info!” works wonders.
“Cool history” was never going to be enough praise! Nonetheless I am actually interested in those details. Am related to a rightist baseball nerd, but one with too little patience to talk baseball with anyone, unless directly applied to, and on something very specific - and even then not very expansively.
Congrats, though, on managing to sound so smart - because it takes smarts surely to make dumb people think you’re holding two different opinions!
I thank you for your tongue-in-cheek praise.
It really wasn’t. The offensiveness to you of “got it done” - seems to have gotten most of that impression done.
I will try again:
Cool and interesting history/background!
Still, one guy had to be comfortable with taking that stage, and another guy with putting him there. Right?
(Insert you explaining “wrong”, followed by new comment by me saying, sounds like Branch Rickey’s role was overstated in my mind, or the like. Or: sounds like there were earlier JR’s ready to take it on.)
Then I turn from phone amusement back to Covid, which in case anyone (else)has followed this far, is so far presenting as: a little dry upper chest cough; a feeling of needing to eat but not getting much nourishment from food; weak shaky legs, weakness generally.
No flu ache though.
I wasn’t offended at all by “get it done.” I merely thought it was empty and bewildering. And I didn’t say, “Wrong,” to your comment, either, because it wasn’t wrong, just empty and not meant to further any conversation.
You seem to be ascribing feelings to me that I’m not feeling, instead being of a bored guy talking baseball in between tedious tasks at work. You just misread something on the Internet. I’ve been on both sides of this exchange many times over the years. Just let it go, man.
Gosh, it never happened to me before ;-).
Depending on when you date it to, the DEI period appears to coincide rather neatly with the de-integration of baseball in recent decades, actually :-).
De-integration? What are you talking about?
A quick search suggests that baseball is plenty integrated; in fact, the large number of South American immigrants makes it more mixed than the United States as a whole. White people appear to be a majority, but a small one.
https://routine.com/blogs/press-box/mlb-player-demographics
Check the figures on African-American baseball players over time.
I mean, the subject *is*
Jackie Robinson.
Numbers there don't really support that; an 8% black league in a 14% black country is not worrying.
From a peak of 18.7% in 1981 …
And of course, once upon a time they had enough for whole leagues, and towns had ball clubs.
In 2047 there will be an anniversary, if MLB is still around; I would think it won’t land *quite* the same way if the number of American black baseball players continues to decline, but YMMV.
There's a big difference between "the popularity of baseball among black people is declining" and "the league is resegregating".
We may be going off different definitions of integration, one abstract and one involving matter.
Of course, I’m only teasing, I understand the abstract is all that matters, to the people who matter.
"I simply do not understand the utility of this constant conflation of different ideas and programs."
Yes you do - its a rhetorical device to insist that DEI can't possibly have been in error or a bad idea because everything is DEI and every anti-racism advance in the past is due to DEI. We can't get rid of DEI because everything is DEI, and the only alternative is racism.
Its a feature, not a bug, that the conservatives say X, then progressives reflexively say Y. They are like two competing companies that, without negotiation, have a lighted on a market strategy that benefits them both to the detriment of the public. It's political parties as identities.
My new thought for the last few weeks is that people that vote on identity are the true "low information voters." They think of nothing of what they've been told, only that they've been told that position X affiliates them with the group of their preference. It does not matter how incoherent it is.
This is the, “CRT is just teaching school kids about slavery!” gambit all over again.
Traditional IDPOL: "I'm an X and, thus, I vote Y"
New IDPOL: "I vote Y and, thus, I'm an X"
I think itʻs a low information concept to label one group "the true" anything, when the clear and obvious situation is that: we are surrounded on all sides by idiots.
Presumably it was phones and microplastics that turned humans into moderately high-functioning gibbons. MODERATELY
"When people say DEI, or Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, they’re referring to a profoundly 21st century school of corporate identity progressivism"
Unfortunately, it's even more complicated than that. "DEI" or the phrase "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion" is (perhaps intentionally?) ambiguous. Often in practice, it *is* used to describe that particular school of 21st century progressivism, but other times, it's used far more literally.
Conservatives will equivocate by saying they want to eliminate DEI in the corporate sense in order to attack it in its more literal sense. On the flipside, progressives equivocate when they defend the corporate kind of DEI by appealing to the literal meaning of "DEI."
I have a friend who worked for a large corporate firm which has gone all in on DEI. He has a health condition and requested a reasonable accommodation, which was denied because his immedatiate boss, who has lost so many employees due to him being a complete jerk, didn't want to lose my friend. The boss is a classic "horrible boss" type and then engaged in 6 months of retaliation.
This uber DEI firm, when presented with the complaint and request for a transfer to another office on the other side of the country, doubled down and fired him. My friend kept documentation of the retaliation, so is in the process of settling for a very large check.
No one should trust claims of pro DEI anymore than we trust politicians to keep promises.
Someone shared a WSJ news article with me about Morgan Stanley's whiplash from their DEI craze and rapid reversal, and they're getting sued by both black and white employees. I want to see them lose to both groups simultaneously because it looks like they both got screwed.
the dirty secret of DEI: it's a honey trap for Litigation. Who's guaranteed to win in every dispute, no matter what? Lawyers.
still, that "large check."
Completely agree that it’s anachronistic and wrong to call Robinson a DEI hire, but I have to say: there’s no way a proponent of modern DEI practices would concede that “DEI hires” are less qualified than others. I feel like Freddie snuck in a tiny bit of the conservative redefinition of the term in the way he set up the contrast there.
If they aren’t less qualified than other candidates, aren’t they just regular hires? FdB is not pushing a conservative redefinition of the term, he is reminding us of the actual implications of the term.
The idea is the the people doing the DEI hiring have their own subconscious white supremacism to deal with, and the DEI policies only serve to counterbalance that bias. On occasion this may even be true.
I am skeptical. In practice affirmative action and DEI policies have produced racist nonsense such as the "personality scores" used to disqualify Asian applicants from colleges and universities like Harvard.
That’s fair. Affirmative action is not the same as DEI.
I see this as an unfortunate but somewhat natural result of attempts to conflate the highly defensible and often heroic (breaking the color barrier) with the much less so, i.e. affirmative action. Not so much a motte and bailey but a more of a post modern dodge. 'What is a keep anyway?'
Freddie is correct to distinguish between different concepts and histories but I think his commitment to defending old school affirmative action prevents him from getting to the heart of the issue. While corporate DEI is fundamentally about CYA and public relations, those that embrace this sort of thing do actually want to be able to engage in some rank, demographic balancing i.e. affirmative action. They want that because their DEI programs are ultimately measured based on workforce demographics. The challenge they inevitably run into is the pipeline problem that frustrates most efforts of this nature, which in turn creates pressure to do exactly what affirmative action's critics say is inevitable, that being hiring objectively less qualified people based on racial (or whatever other) considerations.
Now, do I think sports media personalities necessarily have a strong understanding of this? Of course not. They don't typically have a strong understanding of anything. But in light of the above it is no surprise that advocates of DEI and similar modern left of center approaches to dealing with racial inequality would want to cloak the dumb or harder to defend stuff (which, yes, in the 21st century, very much includes affirmative action) with all the good heroic stuff of the 20th century.
It’s the framing George Lakoff talked about. “Death Taxes,” “Right to Life.” Liberals adapt the terminology of their detractors; the incoherent language avoids challenging voters with an actual position that may cost votes, or worse, upset their status quo.
Because no one ever used "Pro-Choice" or "Assault Weapon"?
I don't really have to read this, but I do because I share the same disgust with liberals walking right into the narratives their opponents create for them.
But I was laughing out loud at the end of the first paragraph.
"...and liberals (being the feckless and lazy scolds they are) have decided to join them in doing so, to own Drumpf or whatever. Everything is stupid and I hate it here."
Me too, brother. Me too.
Yes! Why can’t they all work together, ever! Dems could be shocked at the crazy spending and help Reps root it out, Reps could agree that some immigrants are helpful and help Dems figure out a sane way to keep them.
How confident are you that the spending is actually crazy?
And why would the Republicans want to do that? It seems directly contrary to their goals.
The worst offenders that Musk and his team have turned up are pretty awful.
And what are those worst examples?
I'm not just gonna take your word for it.
https://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-mast-exposes-outrageous-usaid-and-state-department-grants/
I have to say, I was expecting much larger numbers.
"Shocked at the crazy spending" had me thinking of big-ticket items. But you could cut all that and nobody would notice or care except for the people directly involved; spending 32K commissioning a comic book is not meaningful to an organization that spends maybe five trillion dollars a year.
Some of those sound perfectly reasonable. Some don't. But all of them look small.
Thank you for this. I’m just spent with this revisionist history that progressives so reliably apply to every aspect of “good” history to further their questionable/dubious policies of today.
I take comfort in others being able to see it too.
I wonder if this very mechanism they so readily use actually inculcates them into believing that “nothing has changed”.
I think they’d probably best make Jackie Robinson a hard stop, year zero; and not go any further back into history.
For instance, they might discover that progressive-minded Southern ladies tended to found schools, often under the auspices of the church, specifically for blacks, in the wake of the Civil War. Is a hate fact like that DEI? You get into an Ourobouros situation there.
I helped interview groups to provide my company with "DEI" consulting, with the explicit internal understanding that this was an HR exercise, not an indoctrination for employees. Some of them were terrible (the D'Angelo/Kendi approach), with pre-packaged presentations to be used in a workshop setting. At the same time, my kids were doing social/emotional learning programs at their schools, with the majority being crap (including some harmful lessons like if you don't fit these negative gender stereotypes, you very well might be transgender) but some of it was good for kids to learn. I was pretty down on the whole effort.
Fortunately, we found an excellent consultant who was great in helping us update some of our policies and approaches with the goal of treating staff fairly and broadening our applicant pool for new hires.
Which is a long way of saying: what parts of the DEI agenda work? Proponents should highlight that while disengaging from the generic debate that champions or attacks these ideas as if they are one-size-fits-all concepts.
“Broadening the applicant pool” seems the most valid and common sense result. At level, it’s the aim of the movement. Add more diversity to the pool, increase the opportunity for hiring. To say some of these things aren’t needed seems to say there were just never any qualified minority/marginalized candidates throughout history.
The best way to broaden the applicant pool is to throw college degree requirements out the window. That opens its own can of worms though.
The problem is Griggs v Duke Power. For 55 years, companies have needed some way to evaluate potential employees without real testing. Allow them to do testing without concern about disparate impact and there should be limited need for a college degree in many fields.
The value of a college degree has probably been fatally diluted anyway. Decades ago the average iq of a college grad was higher than the national average. Now? No difference.
I remember this stupid Twitter fight (but I repeat myself) where a manager was being attacked because they said they didn't give preference in hiring to under-represented minorities.
If I went on Twitter and said "yes, we give preference" that would be incredibly insulting to my employees. I'm going to say, loudly, that they're the best people for the job.
Being open about race/gender/sexuality preferences might even open the door for legal liability.
Yes: “we need to think clearly and argue effectively”. Partly the politicians are simplifying their arguments so us simple folk can understand and partly they are themselves pretty simple.
Great column today, thank you.
I did not hear what Nick Wright had to say, so I do not want to criticize, but I just cannot fathom someone saying that Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball is proof that DEI works. Robinson did not combat coded language and dog whistles. The racism he endured was quite overt. He received death threats. The 1940's and the 2010's-20's, simply put, were completely different times. I do not think any parallel or comparison between Robinson and current DEI hires can be made rationally.
On the larger issue, racism is buttressed by economics. There is a strain of racism, undoubtedly, that manifests itself outside of economic issues, but the type of racism we can combat is economically based. The problem is that DEI training does absolutely nothing to address these issues. The sessions I have attended have been fairly ridiculous, and employees often resent them. They probably stoke more ill will than they prevent. DEI hiring tends to take place at lower-level corporate positions. I remember when I was working at a medical center back in my 20's. The idea of quotas was never really institutionalized at entry-level positions, but only through the positions of janitors, couriers, chart clerks, receptionists, transport, etc. did the medical center meet its supposed quota. Surgeons? Administrators? Registered nurses? From the eye test--and as a courier I saw a lot of the complex--diversity was practically nonexistent.
If we want to do something meaningful to combat racism, then, we have to provide real opportunities for POC to receives strong education and then have good careers available for them. Of course, capitalism does not work that way, as the system needs most of its workers at the bottom who society can justify are there because they didn't work hard enough. So, the solution, then, has to be to introduce a severely modified form of capitalism where wealth is not concentrated among the few on the top. Without that--when everyone is fighting for their own share of the pie--racism provides the frustrated middle with easy scapegoats. It is very sad.
"...like all corporate efforts DEI fundamentally serves the needs of the corporation, and thus actual diversity, equity, and inclusion are secondary goals at best."
In my experience, the employees who really believe in this don't think it's corporate at all. In fact, they see corporations as one of the big baddies, and DEI initiatives as a "grass-roots" effort to keep those big baddies in line. It's a state university, so perhaps that's different. But they really do see this as them telling the institution how to "be better".
In a related note, when Trump started to cut funding to both the DOE and Libraries in general, the librarians where I work were almost completely focusing on the loss of DEI initiatives...despite the huge funding elephant in the room. They couldn't even be bothered with the gigantic economic impact of all of this.
I agree that there are employees and grad students who genuinely don’t see DEI as being corporate, but those people are marks. DEI initiatives, whether they are hiring a new DEI dean of your university, corporate workshops put on by HR, or whatever else, are designed to protect the institution from accusations of racism/sexism/whatever else, not to protect employees from racism/sexism/whatever else.
Oh I agree with you. That they don't/can't see themselves as marks is remarkable.
I don't think all of them are marks. Many of them are just falsifying their preferences (either consciously or unconsciously) because they know (again, either consciously or unconsciously) that doing so is the easiest self-defensive strategy. And then there's the small class of social climbers who can check the right identity boxes and say the right things in order to personally materially benefit from DEI.
Isn't falsifying your preference because you're insecure and easily persuadable the definition of a mark?
That’s a great point, and demonstrated by both non-profits and tech companies getting revolutionary foment from internal DEI supporters.
It was a large scale attempt at entryism, a “third way”, if you will, of dealing with institutions (“wear them as a skin suit”). I’d say it’s failed spectacularly, and now the backlash of authoritarian federal government is even worse (see my “hold my beer” comment earlier).