From 2021 to 2022, I worked as a manager in Microsoft’s AI Platform division. I’ve been working in the software industry for over a decade, and while I’ve often encountered some combination of the words “diversity” and “inclusion,” how those words have been translated into culture and policy has varied dramatically over time and between companies. At Microsoft, I became concerned about diversity and inclusion policies that required me to sacrifice what I viewed as the best way to serve the company’s mission, particularly as it affected work prioritization, hiring, and promotion.
The major consequence of affirmative action in my own life is that I never utilize black professionals, especially not black doctors, as you're practically guaranteed to be served by someone relatively less competent and relatively more entitled. Go for the East Asians instead.
Absent racial biases in hiring there would be no practical reason to discriminate. Thanks to AA, there is.
Hi Yuri, I was looking at your Wikipedia page a while back and noticed Ambassador Michael Carpenter in the references. How strange the managing director of the Penn Biden Center would be found on your page. I wonder if he taught your lectures there???????
Very interesting. I'm a partner at the consulting arm of a Big 4 company (also writing using a pseudonym), and it's very similar to what happens in our firm.
We use these D&I metrics in many places, notably % of people in such groups. And while we tout our incredible numbers to the four winds, they're primarily located in support/admin and the lower ranks. Directors and partners, however, are primarily white males.
I agree that diversity in executive ranks would improve our problem-solving capability and our value to our clients. However, we do it precisely as the author writes: tipping the scales of recruiting and promotion so that more diverse people have a better chance.
By themselves, these efforts are not necessarily flawed. They do accelerate the diversity in the firm. The problem is that they have to work alone, with no complementary measures to improve training and retention.
So you get a situation in which, for example:
- We promote more diverse people to partner ranks - still very few, but more than meritocratic evaluation would promote alone;
- Then we leave them to fend for and find clients by themselves;
- By the end of the year, they have done worse than others (not all - some indeed do perform spectacularly! - but many don't);
- Since variable compensation is meritocratic with a mix of seniority and eat-what-you-kill, they tend to get lower bonuses and be perceived as not-quite-up-to-speed;
- Then a significant number either leave for an executive role, having achieved the partner-level stamp in their CVs; or get recruited by a rival firm since hiring bonuses are much more discretionary than end-of-year ones;
- And so, to make up the difference, we have to continue disproportionately promoting diverse directors and also recruiting diverse partners from other firms.
In conclusion, I'm not against giving a better shot at recruiting and promotion to diverse populations. But doing that and only that, with no extra support, no performance improvement or retention efforts, is a big shot in the foot.
"diversity in executive ranks would improve our problem-solving capability and our value to our clients." - How does having one guy with 25% Black African DNA, or a woman whose grandparents immigrated from Northern Spain to Mexico, in and of itself improve the executive team's ability to solve problems?
It's such obvious nonsense that you can't possibly believe it. The benefits of this freakish system flow to the microscopic group of mostly mixed-race 'blacks' who are capable of operating in cognitively demanding tasks, and are fanatically fought over by corporations, government, and universities, along with the substantially larger group of ethnically European Latinos. It's all simply a religious ritual, which should be (and in fact is) against the law.
Ok, let me clarify: I agree that DNA and gender by themselves are irrelevant to the ability of solving problems. Cognitive diversity, however, is critically important: having multiple perspectives, applying various (sometimes conflicting!) mental models, and being able to constructively integrate diverse points-of-view does make for an objectively better team-based problem-solving capability. I'm not talking about logic/mathematical problems, where all of this doesn't matter; I'm talking about complex problems in a business environment where we deal with real clients and collaborators in a VUCA environment.
If we could just measure "diverse thinking", that'd be perfect. We could interview people blind-folded and apply these objective guidelines and get a great, complementary team. This is quite hard, however, and historically getting the same prototypical white male graduates from the same top-tier universities does tend to produce homogeneous, non-challenging thinking that reinforces the same biases (biases in the cognitive sense, not in the cultural "leftist" sense).
So yeah, there is a reasonable belief which I share that integrating more diverse points-of-view can/should produce better solutions. Unfortunately, in most companies the buck usually stops at "let's get diverse people closer to the top", without giving them the tools to succeed. So it's no wonder they get there, and then flunk out relatively quickly if the organization is meritocratic - like professional services partnerships usually are - or develop into gray bureaucracies if the org is less objective, like I've seen in many of my clients.
If we were to focus on diversity, I'd rather do it right and focus more on the inputs we provide than just "recruiting and promotion", but that's a much harder path... So in the end most companies that do follow these D&I trends do it mostly for show.
That makes more sense. Of course, getting "prototypical white male [and East Asian, and Indian] graduates from the same top-tier universities" worked pretty darned well for Apple and Microsoft up until 2020, but I digress.
It's just confusing to use "diversity" in the sense that you are, since in everyday speech it means "women or ethnicities other than European or East Asian". In my personal experience, "diverse thinking" is most likely to come from ambitious, somewhat disagreeable, culturally Western males, because all of those traits prime one to seek out, occupy, and defend intellectual terrain at odds with the popular consensus. Females and those from non-Western cultures tend to be more collectivist or go-along-to-get-along. I don't recommend sharing this insight with your bosses/partners.
capitalists are incredibly creative. instead of having the professional race & gender zealots outside protesting, give them fake jobs where they're paid to be "diverse" and discuss how "diverse" they are.
thus instead of attacking you, they attack FOR you, and are also lawsuit protection.
But why do you believe skin color predicts diverse thinking? Barack Obama was raised by his mother into the perfect white liberal intellectual type, there was nothing about him that would make him different from Biden for example. There is nothing about Francis Fukuyama that is not very typically Western way of thinking.
You would make so much better with focusing on culture: people born and raised in foreign countries. For a business operating in an international environment it is useful to have someone on born and raised in China or Africa or Eastern Europe or MENA, they will understand some of the differences of doing business there.
But you are not getting any thought diversity from perfectly assimilated Western-born people.
Thanks, Gary, you make a sensible case for corporate diversity, particularly in customer-driven businesses.
You focus then on the lack of on-the-job support for diversity hires. You would know better than me..
Where I think you are maybe a little more charitable to DEI staffing practices than I am is when you state "If we could just measure "diverse thinking", that'd be perfect....". While I agree that it's not straightforward to hire for diverse perspectives, you go a little too far and give a free pass to some really shallow practices. Although data is scarce, there is tremendous suspicion that firms care little about diverse perspectives relative to diverse looks. Consequently, we observe a lot of DEI staffing tendencies that are not such good vibes:
* Minorities from affluent backgrounds
* black people that are not Generational African Americans
* ethnically European "hispanics"
* lumping half of the world's population into the "Asian" bucket and ignoring any diversity in perspective across that vast, diverse group.
They don't preform because they lack the natural talent to perform, which is why they couldn't perform at a lower level. Additional resources would not change this, and simply increase the negative impact they have on the firm.
I understand that some people take comfort in lying to themselves about why they have to submit to injustice. But for others the lies themselves are as painful as the injustice itself.
What I find curious is how people come to actually believe it. When my company send me a link for diversity training, I click through it without reading. It is the bare minimum to keep my job. I think of it like I think of the terms of service on my iPhone.
But you've used your free time to come onto a sub stack obviously hostile to the purpose, to talk to strangers about your support for diversity. It would be like the green grocer trying to talk about uniting the workers of the world when he's in bed with his wife.
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as they say.
Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?
Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;' he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, "What's wrong with the workers of the world uniting?" Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.
The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by modernization the society under it, the more directly the will of the dictator can be exercised- In other words, the dictator can employ more or less naked discipline, avoiding the complex processes of relating to the world and of self justification which ideology involves. But the more complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger and more stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have operated historically, the more individuals must be connected to them from outside, and the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse. It acts as a kind of bridge between the regime and the people, across which the regime approaches the people and the people approach the regime. This explains why ideology plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system: that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts.
Nah, I'm mostly against diversity as it's currently done. Very critical about it, in fact. I do think that cognitive diversity i.e. diversity of thought produces better results, and that since race/gender impact a lot of people's life experiences they could track reasonably well with this... But the way it's done nowadays we'd better not having any of that.
In fact, I wasn't trying to convince anyone of changing their minds. Just exposing my opinion in an educated manner. If that's offensive / hostile to anyone here, well, sorry for bursting their filter bubble. But I do believe that being exposed to diverse opinions can improve our arguments and overall thinking, generally.
Nah, I do admit white males such as me are indeed getting discriminated against, based on our current policies. I do think it could produce better problem-solving, if it was done differently... But it isn't.
Still, being white and male in no way guarantees that one will have good arguments. We do flunk a lot of those who fail to develop good argumentative abilities and instead resort to fallacies and biases, like ad hominem attacks for example.
If diversity caused one to be cognitively different in a way that led to better business outcomes, you wouldn't need to blackmail people into promoting others and then constantly watch them fail.
Saying "well, we just aren't doing it right" is like some diehard 2022 marxist talking about how "real communism" has never been tried.
I think the more likely scenario is that being good at your job mostly tracks to natural talent, that current distributions by race/gender mostly reflect underling natural talent (bell curve), and that this diversity schtick is little more then a shakedown.
I am staunchly opposed to racism in all forms, even when it claims to be well-intentioned, as with DEI and affirmative action programs.
However, the current distributions most likely reflect early education and culture, not innate talent. To the extent that there is something to address here, it must be done well before individuals reach adulthood.
That said, black people were doing quite well - making tremendous generational improvements - before white people decided it is necessary to “help” them. They had low unemployment rates, high marriage rates, and were attaining higher education and wealth at impressive, increasing rates before the (white) world decided they need assistance.
Our “help,” based on the evidence, appears to be the worst possible thing for the people we allegedly wish to help.
I do think that instead of "natural talent" you could believe a combination of "natural talent + development opportunities + cultural expectations". If that was so, something could indeed be done in terms of, say, increasing performance expectations of diverse people (also taking advantage of the Pygmalion Effect) plus providing them better development opportunities since the very beginning. If we did that and measured real effects in terms of performance & promotions, I don't see much of a problem.
Instead, most companies try to directly affect the output without addressing the inputs and then get surprised by the obvious negative second-order effects.
I think that biological factors are pretty determinate of the gender/racial breakdowns we see in nearly every context.
I good example would be education. An awful lot of things have been thrown at the black white gap in achievement, and none of have changed it.
I think heightened D&I is in part a response to the fact that things like education reform have failed. We now know that we aren't going to invest or reform ourselves to closing the gap, and only blunt set asides are going to achieve "equity".
Quoting myself from an earlier reply: "I (think that) DNA and gender by themselves are irrelevant to the ability of solving problems. Cognitive diversity, however, is critically important: having multiple perspectives, applying various (sometimes conflicting!) mental models, and being able to constructively integrate diverse points-of-view does make for an objectively better team-based problem-solving capability. I'm not talking about logic/mathematical problems, where all of this doesn't matter; I'm talking about complex problems in a business environment where we deal with real clients and collaborators in a VUCA environment."
Agree, on both arguments. Hard to identify and measure, and completely disconnected to what current efforts are trying to achieve. That's why it sucks - since there's no discussion on the end-goal, on the rationale for it, on where D&I should reach in order for it to become irrelevant, it becomes a number-measuring contest rather than something that could provoke real positive change.
"Hard to" doesn't mean "impossible to". If it did your point would be correct. But I have experienced that cognitively diverse teams are better at problem solving than cognitively homogeneous ones. You get either a bunch of math geeks or a group of touchy-feely fashionistas at a customer acquisition problem and you'll get two very different and likewise incomplete answers; you mix them up and give them a manager that can constructively integrate their viewpoints, and you get a much more robust answer to give to a client.
The challenge is identifying and measuring these differences throughout our employees' careers without resorting to stereotypes. Since it's hard to do it, well, D&I just gotta D&I themselves to death on what they can actually measure i.e. gender and skin tone, right?
If good is the enemy of great, it doesn't mean that by not trying to be great you're going to be good.... But that's how it feels when we talk about how D&I is working.
It's remarkable that this system is allowed to operate in plain sight - notwithstanding the thousands of pages of non-discrimination laws and intrusive "civil rights" bureaucracies operating at every level of government.
It seems like every white man ever denied a job or promotion at MSFT has an open-and-shut discrimination claim.
Twilio just did a round of layoffs with anti-racism considerations, which means whites and Asians were targeted. If the company doesn’t get sued into bankruptcy then we have no justice system.
Jason, I actually have an even more extreme story while working at Microsoft as a swe last year. Tldr: skip manager started ignoring resumes from men until he could reach 50:50 male/female hires in a certain hiring effort. He publicly shared this to his org as if it was something to be proud of. I’m not sure if others felt the same way, but I kept my mouth shut since I didn’t want to completely destroy my career. It’s reached a point of lunacy how tech management reacts to anyone who even wants to start a conversation around this topic. You will be quietly ushered out of the company if you question such hiring practices.
This D&I mandate also hurts the diverse candidates they are supposed to help! I feel like I may have been on the unfortunate receiving end of these policies:
I completed an OA for the MSFT AI Platform division and was invited to a 'hiring event' style virtual onsite. I'm also latino, which I checked upon filling out my application but didn't think anything of it.
My first interviewer ghosted me. My second one asked the hardest question I've been asked at any any company (a tree based dynamic programming problem) that he wanted me to complete in twenty minutes. For reference I've interviewed at Netflix and passed HC at Google so it's not like algorithmic questions are new to me.
The third interviewer wanted me to do edit distance (I hadn't seen that problem but I was able to complete it) in twenty minutes...
Later I found out the recruiter who reached out to me was a D&I recruiter. I really got the sense that the people interviewing me had no interest in hiring me. Maybe they had to check a box to meet a quota.
Maybe I just got unlucky with tough questions. Who knows. But I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that some hiring managers are annoyed at having to take extra interviews just to check a box, or are extra skeptical of candidates from certain backgrounds.
I used to work at Microsoft. This lethal trajectory started when the current CEO implemented a policy of explicitly financially rewarding discriminatory hiring. Annual bonuses for EVPs and above (I think) are calculated against org demographics, along with actual performance metrics.
Once you start giving your senior executives fatter bonuses in exchange for discriminatory hiring, it becomes completely inevitable. It's statistically impossible to achieve the desired outcomes without discriminating grossly against white people and Asian men, and incentivizing the discrimination guarantees it will happen. I don't know what your experience has been, but I knew Asian men (both South and East) who told me they were passed up for promotions and transfers on account of being men.
I hope managers start speaking out against this, in spite of the risks. There are plenty of non-woke companies out there who would love to hire ex-Microsoft employees, if you're willing to take a pay and benefits cut...and move. It's worth that price, though, to get out of a work environment that has become so poisonous and toxic to the silent majority.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I no longer work in corporate America, but I happen to have quite a few friends who work as recruiters for top social media, fintech, and other technology firms. During the pandemic I had a front row seat to their work-from-home professional lives — and what I heard and saw was absolutely appalling. One friend in particular would speak openly about discriminatory hiring practice (e.g., "this candidate was so strong, but he's a white male. I really want to put forward a black woman for this role."), either unaware or unbothered by the fact that such stated preferences are flatly illegal. He routinely discards the resumes/applications of men with "white" sounding names, and has separate sets of interview questions for white and BIPOC (his term) candidates.
This is not outlier behavior — it is the norm for recruiters at most top firms. The irony, of course, is that it does precisely nothing to balance the scales or create "equity" for historically disadvantaged populations: the black, Latino, trans, etc. candidates they're fighting over come from wealthy families, went to top universities, and share the same rapacious, PMC ideological fervor as their white coworkers. I knew several first-generation immigrants who worked at Uber during its boom years, and not once did I hear any of them express concern for the financial/working conditions of the drivers working as 1099 contractors. They talked a lot about the value of their stock options, though.
I've been experiencing more and more problems with MS Windows for the last couple years (at least). Perhaps Microsoft's lack of meritocracy hiring/promoting is part of the problem.
I'm a middle-aged white male. I worked at Microsoft at HQ in Redmond for a couple of years as a senior manager and left on good terms when we relocated for my wife's career. When I moved back to Seattle a few years later, after spending those years as a director at a larger company, I submitted a few resumes for Microsoft roles I knew I was qualified for. I got an instant call-back from a hiring manager for a quick-turn loop for a job supporting an exec I had worked with productively in my prior role.
Each candidate in a "slate" goes through a "loop" of several interviews with individuals or groups who would be peers or colleagues to the role Microsoft is interviewing to fill. Those people are on or adjacent to the hiring manager's team. If the candidate performs well in that first set of interviews, the loop proceeds to an interview with the hiring manager or the hiring manager's manager, or both.
All four individuals I met with during my loop, including non-native English speakers and people based in other countries, said these exact words to me in exactly the same tone:
"Well, you know that [exec] really want to hire someone into this role who [exec] can learn from, like the incumbent who is a young ... black ... lesbian."
I came home after my loop and told my wife, "I'm not getting that job."
What's interesting in this whole diversity thing and helping out only certain "disadvantaged" groups leaves other groups that are from diverse backgrounds to be discriminated against solely due to the colour of their skin i.e. people of slavic backgrounds.
Wow that sounded really gay. This diversity stuff barely changes who gets hired anyway, so who cares. Also everyone knows who the token hire is so they know who to ignore in meetings.
Woke stuff is pretty much exclusively white collar and especially advertised in these bigger monopolistic companies. It attracts leftists but doesn't actually have anything to do with socialism, so being woke has the effect of being the "leftist" moral veneer over the exploitative capitalism foundational to these businesses. These companies advertise their gay little commitments to diversity but are meanwhile busy cornering markets and squeezing customers with economic rent.
In short wokeness is how companies defeat any kind of nascent leftism so they can continue to monopolize and print money.
The leftist angle has a clear mission of it’s “long march through the institutions” and the techniques they use to accomplish these aims. The lexicon of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity is clearly rooted in leftist, Marxist derived writings and social-historical happenings covering 100 plus years. If there is a discourse on the capitalist manipulation of Marxist tactics written by capitalists and not disgruntled Marxists I’d be interested in learning more about it.
I don't know if there is a name for the concept, but shadowy deep government orgs like the Ford Foundation and Trilateral Commission along with the CIA/FBI have known since the 50s that things like feminist, civil rights groups etc. animate the "non-communist left" and are good at preventing grass- roots socialism from forming. "The Consortium" chapter (and a few others) of the book The Cultural Cold War talk about this.
It's sort of like how OWS (a grass- roots leftist movement) fell apart once the corporate media started hardcore injecting identity politics into their broadcasting. Wokeness only shows up in corporate, white collar settings and it has the effect of redirecting all leftist energy into useless identity politics that are harmless to the interests of global capital.
The CIA was started after WWII by Wall Street lawyer Adam Dulles. Since the 50s these deep government forces have done nothing but overthrow and undermine leftist governments through NGOs and engineered coups for the sole purpose of enabling Wall Street to monopolize resources. If wokeness was "leftist" than why is it flourish do much in the corporate world? The CIA and FBI even use wokeness in their advertising.
Diversity, inclusion, wokeness, etc. is nothing more than the moral veneer of right wing global capitalism that also helps keep socialism irrelevant. Most Americans, including probably most of the people here, don't even know what socialism is and can't even correctly define leftist phrases like "free market" or "economic rent".
Cultural Marxism has roots in Antonio Gramsci who was translated in English by the father of Pete Buttigieg. The modern cultural Marxists including Derek Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Henry Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and the thousands more that worship them don’t cite Reagan or Eisenhower as elder statesmen of the movement. The lineage is very clear. Economic marxism begat cultural Marxism begat critical Marxism begat liberation Marxism begat the revival of cultural Marxism and its identity spin offs. These studies are well established and exclusive to leftist aims.
China has been using the equivalent of CRT for millennia. They have repeatedly used a coalition of dissidents often defined by race to overturn rulers. It was essential to the Xinhai revolution of 1911.
Social Emotional Learning is a distillation of tactics compiled by Lenin and Mao combined with data collection and analysis collected on children for the highest bidder. Not the RNC or Trump. It is very much an extension of Paulo Friere’s liberatory/religious Marxism.
Paulo Friere’s destructive influence (focusing on grooming a child’s “critical consciousness rather than learning) on education via critical pedagogy is easily confirmed by Google scholar. The next head of the American Library Association is a self-described Marxist lesbian critical pedagogist. Meaning the direction the ALA is taking in academic, public, medical, law and private libraries (almost all are ALA affiliated and/or dependent on ALA accreditation and funding) is in the education of critical theory. Much of it for children via activism and critical education heavily influenced by Friere. This is where wokeism partly rose from. Not conservatives.
The game can be run by anyone who wants to play. However, wokeism is exclusively a leftist production.
This is where differences in definitions make things confusing. By right wing I don't mean the Republican party or conservatism, but just neoliberalism which is the belief that lassez Faire capitalism is the most ideal economic system and that corporate regulation is bad. Right wingers downplay the exploitative nature of capitalism. Leftism/socialism, in contrast, believes that a strong government must counter neoliberal interests and nationalize some industries for the good of the citizenry.
I don't think it makes much sense to connect wokeness to pseudo-marxist thought applied to non economic topics, because there's nothing inherently woke about socialism. Yes many wokes are socialist fanboys with a superficial understanding of socialism but that's as far as it goes.
The deep government (CIA, FBI, Bilderburg group, WEF, etc.) from the inception of all these groups were created to oppose socialism and defend the super wealthy and their coporations from having any assets taken away or monopoly privileges revoked. All of those orgs, along with every corporation, happily embrace wokeness because it is a convenient moral position to take that does not threaten them and it kind of resonates in the West which is Christian and therefore guilt based.
I just don't understand how wokeness could come from "the left" when it's the right wing neoliberals that use it.
Marxism is a revolutionary ideology. Socialism or communism are the carrots on the stick. Marxism requires a constant retooling to sell the scam because it doesn’t work without deception and force. I read your argument as what the WEF, UN, elites want is not an overthrow of the bourgeois class so the proletariat can own the means of production. I agree. They want a slave class to keep the world functioning for their purposes.
The only requirement to be a Marxist is to be a revolutionary. The elites manipulate the useful idiots for gain.
A friend consulted at Microsoft a few years ago (one consequence of their dysfunctional hiring practices is that they use lots of outside consultants to run even fairly significant projects). She worked with a female minority executive there who openly “joked” about not needing to do any work since they couldn’t fire her. Only she wasn’t joking.
What I find interesting is that these companies allow a cancerous DIE culture to essentially “disrupt and dismantle” them from the inside. It is after all the openly stated purpose of the trained cultural Marxists. White supremacy, the patriarchy and capitalism undermined in the same manner the Qing Dynasty lost their grip on China to what became the Republic of China. The big difference being it was the minority Manchus that were racially manipulated whereas the majority in the west are the ones under assault. Which leads me to believe that if the Marxists succeed our minority classes may find Stalin’s method of murdering or sending “marginalized” groups to war the “new sensibility” they find themselves living under.
For those interested in learning about a precursor to DIE training I recommend Robert J. Lifton’s “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totality ‘A Study of Brain Washing in China’”. This system is not only followed in DIE but also in Social Emotional Learning which is likely poisoning the schools your children or children you know attend. At casel.org the SEL ghouls are very open about the “conscientization” of students aka adopting the “standpoint of the people”. SEL will make DIE unnecessary when the students become workers with their indoctrination fully in place.
My ex-husband, who has for 30 years called himself female (recently also insisting he's 'mother' of our sons) used the affirmative action for female-owned businesses in the General Services Agency of the federal government. This means that he, a white male with 3 Ivy League graduate degrees, accrued as a male, while I raised our sons as an at-home mother, counts as "female owner" of the tech firm where he's now COO. He hid the fact that he was in an equity contract when I took him back to court for non-payment of child support. Recently, it became evident that our sons do not exist in his corporate world. I became a public school teacher and had the health insurance coverage, so they could be "invisible." Many of my Black friends are greatly insulted that a man such as the one who fathered my sons can get affirmative action for his company, carte blanche, while it is assumed they got this boost for their achievements. Meanwhile, as a teacher, I studied how to help all students, male and female, to think outside of the box, look at problems from many angles. Other than identity politics, how does one group or the other have a corner on the market of "diverse thinking?"
Ute Heggen, author, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022)
Interesting how they exclude Asians. Thanks for posting this. I invest in stocks and this kind of thing will hit the bottom line eventually. I like to know when the companies are basically cooking the books. If MS is doing this for hiring can you imagine what happens in the finance department?
I've worked in MS till few months ago, and saw how all of those policies are circumvented by recruiters and managers focused on getting stuff done. For example we have switched to posting a single req for all of the division increase the chances of interviewing enough candidates who were considered diverse. After we have fulfilled the diversity requirement and until the req is closed we could hire whoever we needed on the same req. Personally, I have never been approached by HR asking me whether any of my team members were considered for promo and I had both female and latin-x developers on my team.
DEI commissars are well paid professional racists. They destroy company culture and in healthcare take resources away from patients. Here is a case study: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/how-to-fire-a-commissar
The major consequence of affirmative action in my own life is that I never utilize black professionals, especially not black doctors, as you're practically guaranteed to be served by someone relatively less competent and relatively more entitled. Go for the East Asians instead.
Absent racial biases in hiring there would be no practical reason to discriminate. Thanks to AA, there is.
Hi Yuri, I was looking at your Wikipedia page a while back and noticed Ambassador Michael Carpenter in the references. How strange the managing director of the Penn Biden Center would be found on your page. I wonder if he taught your lectures there???????
I am using Yuri as a pseudonym, he passed away 30 year ago. To honor his legend I write about the demoralization we are all living through.
Very interesting. I'm a partner at the consulting arm of a Big 4 company (also writing using a pseudonym), and it's very similar to what happens in our firm.
We use these D&I metrics in many places, notably % of people in such groups. And while we tout our incredible numbers to the four winds, they're primarily located in support/admin and the lower ranks. Directors and partners, however, are primarily white males.
I agree that diversity in executive ranks would improve our problem-solving capability and our value to our clients. However, we do it precisely as the author writes: tipping the scales of recruiting and promotion so that more diverse people have a better chance.
By themselves, these efforts are not necessarily flawed. They do accelerate the diversity in the firm. The problem is that they have to work alone, with no complementary measures to improve training and retention.
So you get a situation in which, for example:
- We promote more diverse people to partner ranks - still very few, but more than meritocratic evaluation would promote alone;
- Then we leave them to fend for and find clients by themselves;
- By the end of the year, they have done worse than others (not all - some indeed do perform spectacularly! - but many don't);
- Since variable compensation is meritocratic with a mix of seniority and eat-what-you-kill, they tend to get lower bonuses and be perceived as not-quite-up-to-speed;
- Then a significant number either leave for an executive role, having achieved the partner-level stamp in their CVs; or get recruited by a rival firm since hiring bonuses are much more discretionary than end-of-year ones;
- And so, to make up the difference, we have to continue disproportionately promoting diverse directors and also recruiting diverse partners from other firms.
In conclusion, I'm not against giving a better shot at recruiting and promotion to diverse populations. But doing that and only that, with no extra support, no performance improvement or retention efforts, is a big shot in the foot.
"diversity in executive ranks would improve our problem-solving capability and our value to our clients." - How does having one guy with 25% Black African DNA, or a woman whose grandparents immigrated from Northern Spain to Mexico, in and of itself improve the executive team's ability to solve problems?
It's such obvious nonsense that you can't possibly believe it. The benefits of this freakish system flow to the microscopic group of mostly mixed-race 'blacks' who are capable of operating in cognitively demanding tasks, and are fanatically fought over by corporations, government, and universities, along with the substantially larger group of ethnically European Latinos. It's all simply a religious ritual, which should be (and in fact is) against the law.
Ok, let me clarify: I agree that DNA and gender by themselves are irrelevant to the ability of solving problems. Cognitive diversity, however, is critically important: having multiple perspectives, applying various (sometimes conflicting!) mental models, and being able to constructively integrate diverse points-of-view does make for an objectively better team-based problem-solving capability. I'm not talking about logic/mathematical problems, where all of this doesn't matter; I'm talking about complex problems in a business environment where we deal with real clients and collaborators in a VUCA environment.
If we could just measure "diverse thinking", that'd be perfect. We could interview people blind-folded and apply these objective guidelines and get a great, complementary team. This is quite hard, however, and historically getting the same prototypical white male graduates from the same top-tier universities does tend to produce homogeneous, non-challenging thinking that reinforces the same biases (biases in the cognitive sense, not in the cultural "leftist" sense).
So yeah, there is a reasonable belief which I share that integrating more diverse points-of-view can/should produce better solutions. Unfortunately, in most companies the buck usually stops at "let's get diverse people closer to the top", without giving them the tools to succeed. So it's no wonder they get there, and then flunk out relatively quickly if the organization is meritocratic - like professional services partnerships usually are - or develop into gray bureaucracies if the org is less objective, like I've seen in many of my clients.
If we were to focus on diversity, I'd rather do it right and focus more on the inputs we provide than just "recruiting and promotion", but that's a much harder path... So in the end most companies that do follow these D&I trends do it mostly for show.
That makes more sense. Of course, getting "prototypical white male [and East Asian, and Indian] graduates from the same top-tier universities" worked pretty darned well for Apple and Microsoft up until 2020, but I digress.
It's just confusing to use "diversity" in the sense that you are, since in everyday speech it means "women or ethnicities other than European or East Asian". In my personal experience, "diverse thinking" is most likely to come from ambitious, somewhat disagreeable, culturally Western males, because all of those traits prime one to seek out, occupy, and defend intellectual terrain at odds with the popular consensus. Females and those from non-Western cultures tend to be more collectivist or go-along-to-get-along. I don't recommend sharing this insight with your bosses/partners.
Wharton now offers majors in DEI and ESG, so the younger grads will have no diversity of thought. The Long March continues.
capitalists are incredibly creative. instead of having the professional race & gender zealots outside protesting, give them fake jobs where they're paid to be "diverse" and discuss how "diverse" they are.
thus instead of attacking you, they attack FOR you, and are also lawsuit protection.
brilliant!
But why do you believe skin color predicts diverse thinking? Barack Obama was raised by his mother into the perfect white liberal intellectual type, there was nothing about him that would make him different from Biden for example. There is nothing about Francis Fukuyama that is not very typically Western way of thinking.
You would make so much better with focusing on culture: people born and raised in foreign countries. For a business operating in an international environment it is useful to have someone on born and raised in China or Africa or Eastern Europe or MENA, they will understand some of the differences of doing business there.
But you are not getting any thought diversity from perfectly assimilated Western-born people.
Thanks, Gary, you make a sensible case for corporate diversity, particularly in customer-driven businesses.
You focus then on the lack of on-the-job support for diversity hires. You would know better than me..
Where I think you are maybe a little more charitable to DEI staffing practices than I am is when you state "If we could just measure "diverse thinking", that'd be perfect....". While I agree that it's not straightforward to hire for diverse perspectives, you go a little too far and give a free pass to some really shallow practices. Although data is scarce, there is tremendous suspicion that firms care little about diverse perspectives relative to diverse looks. Consequently, we observe a lot of DEI staffing tendencies that are not such good vibes:
* Minorities from affluent backgrounds
* black people that are not Generational African Americans
* ethnically European "hispanics"
* lumping half of the world's population into the "Asian" bucket and ignoring any diversity in perspective across that vast, diverse group.
They don't preform because they lack the natural talent to perform, which is why they couldn't perform at a lower level. Additional resources would not change this, and simply increase the negative impact they have on the firm.
I understand that some people take comfort in lying to themselves about why they have to submit to injustice. But for others the lies themselves are as painful as the injustice itself.
What I find curious is how people come to actually believe it. When my company send me a link for diversity training, I click through it without reading. It is the bare minimum to keep my job. I think of it like I think of the terms of service on my iPhone.
But you've used your free time to come onto a sub stack obviously hostile to the purpose, to talk to strangers about your support for diversity. It would be like the green grocer trying to talk about uniting the workers of the world when he's in bed with his wife.
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-vaclav-havel-2011-12-23
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: "Workers of the world, unite!" Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment's thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life "in harmony with society," as they say.
Obviously the greengrocer is indifferent to the semantic content of the slogan on exhibit; he does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: "I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace." This message, of course, has an addressee: it is directed above, to the greengrocer's superior, and at the same time it is a shield that protects the greengrocer from potential informers. The slogan's real meaning, therefore, is rooted firmly in the greengrocer's existence. It reflects his vital interests. But what are those vital interests?
Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan "I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;' he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction. It must allow the greengrocer to say, "What's wrong with the workers of the world uniting?" Thus the sign helps the greengrocer to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience, at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high. And that something is ideology.
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.
The smaller a dictatorship and the less stratified by modernization the society under it, the more directly the will of the dictator can be exercised- In other words, the dictator can employ more or less naked discipline, avoiding the complex processes of relating to the world and of self justification which ideology involves. But the more complex the mechanisms of power become, the larger and more stratified the society they embrace, and the longer they have operated historically, the more individuals must be connected to them from outside, and the greater the importance attached to the ideological excuse. It acts as a kind of bridge between the regime and the people, across which the regime approaches the people and the people approach the regime. This explains why ideology plays such an important role in the post-totalitarian system: that complex machinery of units, hierarchies, transmission belts, and indirect instruments of manipulation which ensure in countless ways the integrity of the regime, leaving nothing to chance, would be quite simply unthinkable without ideology acting as its all-embracing excuse and as the excuse for each of its parts.
Nah, I'm mostly against diversity as it's currently done. Very critical about it, in fact. I do think that cognitive diversity i.e. diversity of thought produces better results, and that since race/gender impact a lot of people's life experiences they could track reasonably well with this... But the way it's done nowadays we'd better not having any of that.
In fact, I wasn't trying to convince anyone of changing their minds. Just exposing my opinion in an educated manner. If that's offensive / hostile to anyone here, well, sorry for bursting their filter bubble. But I do believe that being exposed to diverse opinions can improve our arguments and overall thinking, generally.
"I agree that diversity in executive ranks would improve our problem-solving capability"
why?
It would be psychologically emasculating to admit your getting discriminated against and your too cowardly to do anything about it.
Nah, I do admit white males such as me are indeed getting discriminated against, based on our current policies. I do think it could produce better problem-solving, if it was done differently... But it isn't.
Still, being white and male in no way guarantees that one will have good arguments. We do flunk a lot of those who fail to develop good argumentative abilities and instead resort to fallacies and biases, like ad hominem attacks for example.
If diversity caused one to be cognitively different in a way that led to better business outcomes, you wouldn't need to blackmail people into promoting others and then constantly watch them fail.
Saying "well, we just aren't doing it right" is like some diehard 2022 marxist talking about how "real communism" has never been tried.
I think the more likely scenario is that being good at your job mostly tracks to natural talent, that current distributions by race/gender mostly reflect underling natural talent (bell curve), and that this diversity schtick is little more then a shakedown.
I am staunchly opposed to racism in all forms, even when it claims to be well-intentioned, as with DEI and affirmative action programs.
However, the current distributions most likely reflect early education and culture, not innate talent. To the extent that there is something to address here, it must be done well before individuals reach adulthood.
That said, black people were doing quite well - making tremendous generational improvements - before white people decided it is necessary to “help” them. They had low unemployment rates, high marriage rates, and were attaining higher education and wealth at impressive, increasing rates before the (white) world decided they need assistance.
Our “help,” based on the evidence, appears to be the worst possible thing for the people we allegedly wish to help.
I do think that instead of "natural talent" you could believe a combination of "natural talent + development opportunities + cultural expectations". If that was so, something could indeed be done in terms of, say, increasing performance expectations of diverse people (also taking advantage of the Pygmalion Effect) plus providing them better development opportunities since the very beginning. If we did that and measured real effects in terms of performance & promotions, I don't see much of a problem.
Instead, most companies try to directly affect the output without addressing the inputs and then get surprised by the obvious negative second-order effects.
I think that biological factors are pretty determinate of the gender/racial breakdowns we see in nearly every context.
I good example would be education. An awful lot of things have been thrown at the black white gap in achievement, and none of have changed it.
I think heightened D&I is in part a response to the fact that things like education reform have failed. We now know that we aren't going to invest or reform ourselves to closing the gap, and only blunt set asides are going to achieve "equity".
Quoting myself from an earlier reply: "I (think that) DNA and gender by themselves are irrelevant to the ability of solving problems. Cognitive diversity, however, is critically important: having multiple perspectives, applying various (sometimes conflicting!) mental models, and being able to constructively integrate diverse points-of-view does make for an objectively better team-based problem-solving capability. I'm not talking about logic/mathematical problems, where all of this doesn't matter; I'm talking about complex problems in a business environment where we deal with real clients and collaborators in a VUCA environment."
That's it, essentially
"cognitive diversity"
How would you identify, let alone measure such things? We all know that this is not what "EDI" efforts are looking for.
Agree, on both arguments. Hard to identify and measure, and completely disconnected to what current efforts are trying to achieve. That's why it sucks - since there's no discussion on the end-goal, on the rationale for it, on where D&I should reach in order for it to become irrelevant, it becomes a number-measuring contest rather than something that could provoke real positive change.
If it's undefinable and unmeasurable, perhaps it is premature to assert that "it would improve our problem-solving capability".
"Hard to" doesn't mean "impossible to". If it did your point would be correct. But I have experienced that cognitively diverse teams are better at problem solving than cognitively homogeneous ones. You get either a bunch of math geeks or a group of touchy-feely fashionistas at a customer acquisition problem and you'll get two very different and likewise incomplete answers; you mix them up and give them a manager that can constructively integrate their viewpoints, and you get a much more robust answer to give to a client.
The challenge is identifying and measuring these differences throughout our employees' careers without resorting to stereotypes. Since it's hard to do it, well, D&I just gotta D&I themselves to death on what they can actually measure i.e. gender and skin tone, right?
If good is the enemy of great, it doesn't mean that by not trying to be great you're going to be good.... But that's how it feels when we talk about how D&I is working.
It's remarkable that this system is allowed to operate in plain sight - notwithstanding the thousands of pages of non-discrimination laws and intrusive "civil rights" bureaucracies operating at every level of government.
It seems like every white man ever denied a job or promotion at MSFT has an open-and-shut discrimination claim.
The law is whatever judges say it is.
Judges are leftist who believe discriminating against whites is a good thing and should be allowed.
Twilio just did a round of layoffs with anti-racism considerations, which means whites and Asians were targeted. If the company doesn’t get sued into bankruptcy then we have no justice system.
Jason, I actually have an even more extreme story while working at Microsoft as a swe last year. Tldr: skip manager started ignoring resumes from men until he could reach 50:50 male/female hires in a certain hiring effort. He publicly shared this to his org as if it was something to be proud of. I’m not sure if others felt the same way, but I kept my mouth shut since I didn’t want to completely destroy my career. It’s reached a point of lunacy how tech management reacts to anyone who even wants to start a conversation around this topic. You will be quietly ushered out of the company if you question such hiring practices.
This D&I mandate also hurts the diverse candidates they are supposed to help! I feel like I may have been on the unfortunate receiving end of these policies:
I completed an OA for the MSFT AI Platform division and was invited to a 'hiring event' style virtual onsite. I'm also latino, which I checked upon filling out my application but didn't think anything of it.
My first interviewer ghosted me. My second one asked the hardest question I've been asked at any any company (a tree based dynamic programming problem) that he wanted me to complete in twenty minutes. For reference I've interviewed at Netflix and passed HC at Google so it's not like algorithmic questions are new to me.
The third interviewer wanted me to do edit distance (I hadn't seen that problem but I was able to complete it) in twenty minutes...
Later I found out the recruiter who reached out to me was a D&I recruiter. I really got the sense that the people interviewing me had no interest in hiring me. Maybe they had to check a box to meet a quota.
Maybe I just got unlucky with tough questions. Who knows. But I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that some hiring managers are annoyed at having to take extra interviews just to check a box, or are extra skeptical of candidates from certain backgrounds.
I used to work at Microsoft. This lethal trajectory started when the current CEO implemented a policy of explicitly financially rewarding discriminatory hiring. Annual bonuses for EVPs and above (I think) are calculated against org demographics, along with actual performance metrics.
Once you start giving your senior executives fatter bonuses in exchange for discriminatory hiring, it becomes completely inevitable. It's statistically impossible to achieve the desired outcomes without discriminating grossly against white people and Asian men, and incentivizing the discrimination guarantees it will happen. I don't know what your experience has been, but I knew Asian men (both South and East) who told me they were passed up for promotions and transfers on account of being men.
I hope managers start speaking out against this, in spite of the risks. There are plenty of non-woke companies out there who would love to hire ex-Microsoft employees, if you're willing to take a pay and benefits cut...and move. It's worth that price, though, to get out of a work environment that has become so poisonous and toxic to the silent majority.
Thanks for sharing your experience. I no longer work in corporate America, but I happen to have quite a few friends who work as recruiters for top social media, fintech, and other technology firms. During the pandemic I had a front row seat to their work-from-home professional lives — and what I heard and saw was absolutely appalling. One friend in particular would speak openly about discriminatory hiring practice (e.g., "this candidate was so strong, but he's a white male. I really want to put forward a black woman for this role."), either unaware or unbothered by the fact that such stated preferences are flatly illegal. He routinely discards the resumes/applications of men with "white" sounding names, and has separate sets of interview questions for white and BIPOC (his term) candidates.
This is not outlier behavior — it is the norm for recruiters at most top firms. The irony, of course, is that it does precisely nothing to balance the scales or create "equity" for historically disadvantaged populations: the black, Latino, trans, etc. candidates they're fighting over come from wealthy families, went to top universities, and share the same rapacious, PMC ideological fervor as their white coworkers. I knew several first-generation immigrants who worked at Uber during its boom years, and not once did I hear any of them express concern for the financial/working conditions of the drivers working as 1099 contractors. They talked a lot about the value of their stock options, though.
I've been experiencing more and more problems with MS Windows for the last couple years (at least). Perhaps Microsoft's lack of meritocracy hiring/promoting is part of the problem.
I'm a middle-aged white male. I worked at Microsoft at HQ in Redmond for a couple of years as a senior manager and left on good terms when we relocated for my wife's career. When I moved back to Seattle a few years later, after spending those years as a director at a larger company, I submitted a few resumes for Microsoft roles I knew I was qualified for. I got an instant call-back from a hiring manager for a quick-turn loop for a job supporting an exec I had worked with productively in my prior role.
Each candidate in a "slate" goes through a "loop" of several interviews with individuals or groups who would be peers or colleagues to the role Microsoft is interviewing to fill. Those people are on or adjacent to the hiring manager's team. If the candidate performs well in that first set of interviews, the loop proceeds to an interview with the hiring manager or the hiring manager's manager, or both.
All four individuals I met with during my loop, including non-native English speakers and people based in other countries, said these exact words to me in exactly the same tone:
"Well, you know that [exec] really want to hire someone into this role who [exec] can learn from, like the incumbent who is a young ... black ... lesbian."
I came home after my loop and told my wife, "I'm not getting that job."
And I was right.
What's interesting in this whole diversity thing and helping out only certain "disadvantaged" groups leaves other groups that are from diverse backgrounds to be discriminated against solely due to the colour of their skin i.e. people of slavic backgrounds.
Wow that sounded really gay. This diversity stuff barely changes who gets hired anyway, so who cares. Also everyone knows who the token hire is so they know who to ignore in meetings.
Woke stuff is pretty much exclusively white collar and especially advertised in these bigger monopolistic companies. It attracts leftists but doesn't actually have anything to do with socialism, so being woke has the effect of being the "leftist" moral veneer over the exploitative capitalism foundational to these businesses. These companies advertise their gay little commitments to diversity but are meanwhile busy cornering markets and squeezing customers with economic rent.
In short wokeness is how companies defeat any kind of nascent leftism so they can continue to monopolize and print money.
The leftist angle has a clear mission of it’s “long march through the institutions” and the techniques they use to accomplish these aims. The lexicon of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity is clearly rooted in leftist, Marxist derived writings and social-historical happenings covering 100 plus years. If there is a discourse on the capitalist manipulation of Marxist tactics written by capitalists and not disgruntled Marxists I’d be interested in learning more about it.
I don't know if there is a name for the concept, but shadowy deep government orgs like the Ford Foundation and Trilateral Commission along with the CIA/FBI have known since the 50s that things like feminist, civil rights groups etc. animate the "non-communist left" and are good at preventing grass- roots socialism from forming. "The Consortium" chapter (and a few others) of the book The Cultural Cold War talk about this.
It's sort of like how OWS (a grass- roots leftist movement) fell apart once the corporate media started hardcore injecting identity politics into their broadcasting. Wokeness only shows up in corporate, white collar settings and it has the effect of redirecting all leftist energy into useless identity politics that are harmless to the interests of global capital.
The CIA was started after WWII by Wall Street lawyer Adam Dulles. Since the 50s these deep government forces have done nothing but overthrow and undermine leftist governments through NGOs and engineered coups for the sole purpose of enabling Wall Street to monopolize resources. If wokeness was "leftist" than why is it flourish do much in the corporate world? The CIA and FBI even use wokeness in their advertising.
Diversity, inclusion, wokeness, etc. is nothing more than the moral veneer of right wing global capitalism that also helps keep socialism irrelevant. Most Americans, including probably most of the people here, don't even know what socialism is and can't even correctly define leftist phrases like "free market" or "economic rent".
Tl;Dr woke is a right wing creation
Cultural Marxism has roots in Antonio Gramsci who was translated in English by the father of Pete Buttigieg. The modern cultural Marxists including Derek Bell, Kimberle Crenshaw, Henry Kendi, Robin DiAngelo and the thousands more that worship them don’t cite Reagan or Eisenhower as elder statesmen of the movement. The lineage is very clear. Economic marxism begat cultural Marxism begat critical Marxism begat liberation Marxism begat the revival of cultural Marxism and its identity spin offs. These studies are well established and exclusive to leftist aims.
China has been using the equivalent of CRT for millennia. They have repeatedly used a coalition of dissidents often defined by race to overturn rulers. It was essential to the Xinhai revolution of 1911.
Social Emotional Learning is a distillation of tactics compiled by Lenin and Mao combined with data collection and analysis collected on children for the highest bidder. Not the RNC or Trump. It is very much an extension of Paulo Friere’s liberatory/religious Marxism.
Paulo Friere’s destructive influence (focusing on grooming a child’s “critical consciousness rather than learning) on education via critical pedagogy is easily confirmed by Google scholar. The next head of the American Library Association is a self-described Marxist lesbian critical pedagogist. Meaning the direction the ALA is taking in academic, public, medical, law and private libraries (almost all are ALA affiliated and/or dependent on ALA accreditation and funding) is in the education of critical theory. Much of it for children via activism and critical education heavily influenced by Friere. This is where wokeism partly rose from. Not conservatives.
The game can be run by anyone who wants to play. However, wokeism is exclusively a leftist production.
This is where differences in definitions make things confusing. By right wing I don't mean the Republican party or conservatism, but just neoliberalism which is the belief that lassez Faire capitalism is the most ideal economic system and that corporate regulation is bad. Right wingers downplay the exploitative nature of capitalism. Leftism/socialism, in contrast, believes that a strong government must counter neoliberal interests and nationalize some industries for the good of the citizenry.
I don't think it makes much sense to connect wokeness to pseudo-marxist thought applied to non economic topics, because there's nothing inherently woke about socialism. Yes many wokes are socialist fanboys with a superficial understanding of socialism but that's as far as it goes.
The deep government (CIA, FBI, Bilderburg group, WEF, etc.) from the inception of all these groups were created to oppose socialism and defend the super wealthy and their coporations from having any assets taken away or monopoly privileges revoked. All of those orgs, along with every corporation, happily embrace wokeness because it is a convenient moral position to take that does not threaten them and it kind of resonates in the West which is Christian and therefore guilt based.
I just don't understand how wokeness could come from "the left" when it's the right wing neoliberals that use it.
Marxism is a revolutionary ideology. Socialism or communism are the carrots on the stick. Marxism requires a constant retooling to sell the scam because it doesn’t work without deception and force. I read your argument as what the WEF, UN, elites want is not an overthrow of the bourgeois class so the proletariat can own the means of production. I agree. They want a slave class to keep the world functioning for their purposes.
The only requirement to be a Marxist is to be a revolutionary. The elites manipulate the useful idiots for gain.
"wokeness is how companies defeat any kind of nascent leftism so they can continue to monopolize" Sounds very much like Ramaswamy's thesis, you should read Hanania's review: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/11/the-weakness-of-conservative-anti-wokeness/
I don't think there's any evidence this is really true. Leftists generally love wokeness and don't view it as a subversion of their real goals.
A friend consulted at Microsoft a few years ago (one consequence of their dysfunctional hiring practices is that they use lots of outside consultants to run even fairly significant projects). She worked with a female minority executive there who openly “joked” about not needing to do any work since they couldn’t fire her. Only she wasn’t joking.
What I find interesting is that these companies allow a cancerous DIE culture to essentially “disrupt and dismantle” them from the inside. It is after all the openly stated purpose of the trained cultural Marxists. White supremacy, the patriarchy and capitalism undermined in the same manner the Qing Dynasty lost their grip on China to what became the Republic of China. The big difference being it was the minority Manchus that were racially manipulated whereas the majority in the west are the ones under assault. Which leads me to believe that if the Marxists succeed our minority classes may find Stalin’s method of murdering or sending “marginalized” groups to war the “new sensibility” they find themselves living under.
For those interested in learning about a precursor to DIE training I recommend Robert J. Lifton’s “Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totality ‘A Study of Brain Washing in China’”. This system is not only followed in DIE but also in Social Emotional Learning which is likely poisoning the schools your children or children you know attend. At casel.org the SEL ghouls are very open about the “conscientization” of students aka adopting the “standpoint of the people”. SEL will make DIE unnecessary when the students become workers with their indoctrination fully in place.
My ex-husband, who has for 30 years called himself female (recently also insisting he's 'mother' of our sons) used the affirmative action for female-owned businesses in the General Services Agency of the federal government. This means that he, a white male with 3 Ivy League graduate degrees, accrued as a male, while I raised our sons as an at-home mother, counts as "female owner" of the tech firm where he's now COO. He hid the fact that he was in an equity contract when I took him back to court for non-payment of child support. Recently, it became evident that our sons do not exist in his corporate world. I became a public school teacher and had the health insurance coverage, so they could be "invisible." Many of my Black friends are greatly insulted that a man such as the one who fathered my sons can get affirmative action for his company, carte blanche, while it is assumed they got this boost for their achievements. Meanwhile, as a teacher, I studied how to help all students, male and female, to think outside of the box, look at problems from many angles. Other than identity politics, how does one group or the other have a corner on the market of "diverse thinking?"
Ute Heggen, author, In the Curated Woods, True Tales from a Grass Widow (iuniverse, 2022)
uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com
Interesting how they exclude Asians. Thanks for posting this. I invest in stocks and this kind of thing will hit the bottom line eventually. I like to know when the companies are basically cooking the books. If MS is doing this for hiring can you imagine what happens in the finance department?
I've worked in MS till few months ago, and saw how all of those policies are circumvented by recruiters and managers focused on getting stuff done. For example we have switched to posting a single req for all of the division increase the chances of interviewing enough candidates who were considered diverse. After we have fulfilled the diversity requirement and until the req is closed we could hire whoever we needed on the same req. Personally, I have never been approached by HR asking me whether any of my team members were considered for promo and I had both female and latin-x developers on my team.