this entire crusade against diversity in hiring and admissions is based on the supposition that all white men are necessarily more qualified than any nonwhite person or woman who might be considered for the job. like, this lawsuit more or less states that outright.
for these people the mere presence of any nonwhite person, and especially any black person, in a desired and prestigious position is on its face evidence of anti-white discrimination and unfair preferences.
it’s why you have people still blaming affirmative action for why their kids couldn’t get into harvard et al. it’s not legacies or the fact that these places are hyper-selective. it’s that there is *a* black person who took *your* spot.
Moreover, if you’ve ever actually participated in hiring anybody, you know the idea that you can arrange the applicants in a line in order of how objectively qualified they are with one at the top is silly anyway. Most hiring processes involving choosing among multiple perfectly qualified people.
exactly. the idea that there is a single and reliable way to judge “merit,” that this can be purely quantitative and that job performance is a straightforward function of “merit” should be ridiculous to anyone who has held a job
but they know this too. their belief is that white men ought to be entitled to the most valuable and prestigious positions irrespective of whether they can actually perform in them.
Well, I also think people really like that idea of meritocracy when it means history suggests people like them have more merit than everybody else. Overrepresentation in elite spaces becomes evidence of superiority. It’s hard to convince them to give that up.
Which boxes do you need to check?
Why affirmative action was so good. You grew up in a crappy rural or inner city area, with a single parent and got 1250 on your SATs, impresses me much more than the kid who had 2 professional parents and tutors getting 1400.
Often, the most qualified is the one who accepts the pay we offer. Also, if all the applicants have the same background, ofc subjective factors play a role. Besides even in "prestigious" factors, it's subjective. Ppl choose "lesser" thgs for good reasons-- no finaid, distance from fam, etc
And white women. Forty years ago, my wife, who is Black, had to defy her high school guidance counselors just to apply to the University of Texas. She has her Ph.D. from there. Today, many of these people think that Black people shouldn’t be able to apply. That is the direction they are going.
But it is an incredibly useful fiction that can be deployed, with accompanying cherry-picked metrics, when justifying hiring your brother-in-law's brother-in-law or your sorority sister as "the most qualified candidate."
It's even worse than that. While you can't do that for an individual job, we can see what hiring practices are better in general.
Study after study has shown that racially diverse companies outperform their monochrome competition.
Their goal isn't "the best business," it's "the whitest one."
In BigLaw the hiring department gatekept basic qualifications but past that a lot was basically vibes, a "does this person feel like they fit our style and would I work with them"
The kind of person who sues like this almost certainly has terrible vibes people don't want to work with!
And, I think, for those who have risen to the top, recognizing that "merit" isn't the quantitative yardstick they claim it is would mean recognizing that luck has had something to do with where they landed (I saw this a lot in the years I spent at Accenture).
The single qualification for merit they really have is being white or Asian. It isn’t actually quantitative. The students for fair admissions wrote about MIT, Berkeley, and Caltech even though they’re plaintiff lacked the quantitative merits to be accepted to any of them.
I’m on a hiring committee at my uni every year. We have a multipoint quantitative screening procedure that is pretty obviously an exercise in CYA. It shows we “measured their merit.” To some extent it does, but we could measure it just as much, much faster, w/o the procedure.
I think those things can be helpful, to be honest, as one element of a process. Obviously incomplete, but given the biases that seep in when people hire by “feel” or “fit,” I think it’s worth trying to put pressure on your own measurements. But yes, it’s inexact in the extreme.
I’ve been involved in a lot of hiring and have learned that basically no candidate is perfect & people tend to see what they want to see. “Diversity” tips the scales far less than homogeneity (masked as “culture fit”) and then you just see multiple versions of the same guy walking around the office
Going through 10’s of interview processes before landing a position, and feeling like I got the job because I vibed better with this manager than others, personally revealed the lie of meritocracy!
Also, for conservative ‘intellectuals’ with sinecure positions, they’ve been groomed for years for their position—the idea that people work jobs randomly assigned to them by the marketplace is probably unfathomable!
I imagine this is very much the case at the Ivies. Thousands of top tier students competing for a few hundred spots? At that point, selection is going to be based on arbitrary criteria, or just be outright random.
A dentist I went to said something about it being easier for his next kid to get into college because of the anti-AA decision and I was speechless. Fellow white person, that is NOT how it works. 😳
I guarantee that if that dentist’s kid does not get into their preferred college, that dentist will still blame affirmative action. The unspoken belief is that people like them *deserve opportunity* and people who don’t look like them do not.
I have an older relative who blamed affirmative action for his not getting into his preferred college, even though he entered college before affirmative action began.
The entire time the 20% or whatever it is of unqualified legacy or donor kids just skate on by, as everyone argues over the one spot that might have gone to an exceptional minority candidate instead.
I had a roommate in medical school that complained about DEI but he only got in because of DEI (he was white but was considered diversity because he came from a rural underserved community).
Yes. They actually cast that as benevolent. They actually say it’s liberal or fair due Black people to be steered or limited to manual and menial labor. Echoes of the benevolence of slavery handed down and repackaged as a form of liberalism. Quite a number of white academics advanced that argument.
yeah when I was working in trades, if it was with a bunch of other white guys I'd hear all kinds of racist shit and I'm like "uh i definitely don't share your opinions just because I'm also white, guy. don't say shit like that in front of me, or anyone"
It's also always interesting what people mean when they say "college" because your local community college is also "college" but I'm guessing your dentist would consider that a failure as well.
I have *never* understood the college admissions thing. Moving neighborhoods for a "good" elementary or high school at least makes sense to me, as a decision warped by a lot of bad structural problems, but why do people get so hung up on specific colleges?
Maybe it's because I went to a state school and had a great experience, but the factors in getting your degree in idk accounting from one of the best schools compared to just an okay school seem marginal. Most people don't go to the best schools and their careers turn out fine
Ideally you're right, but in some industries or some specific firms you CANNOT GET HIRED unless your ticket's punched from one of a specific set of institutions.
HELL, even if it was, if you're doing graduate work elsewhere, not even the, "Hey I went to X undergrad," gets past the HR drones.
People really underestimate how hyperselective they are as well. They see 3% acceptance rate and don't realize how good the pool is. That your kid is valedictorian and has a 1450 SAT might not even put them in the top half of applicants to a place like Harvard (without a legacy connection).
right, these schools are so selective that if the single best student at every high school in the US applied to say, Harvard, the vast majority would be rejected.
