Vacations for all
Trump doing the end DEI thing.
President Donald Trump has ordered that all US government staff working on diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes be put on immediate paid administrative leave.
The White House confirmed that all federal DEI workers had to be put on leave by 17:00 EST (22:00 GMT) on Wednesday, before the offices and programmes in question were shut down.
The executive order requires federal hiring, promotions and performance reviews [to] “reward individual initiative” rather than “DEI-related factors”.
It revokes a 1965 executive order signed by former President Lyndon B Johnson that makes it illegal for federal contractors to discriminate on the basis of “race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or national origin” in their hiring.
What???
Why do that? Why not just stick to the “color-blind” mantra?
But also though – did the order signed by Johnson really cite “gender identity”? I don’t believe that. It wasn’t a category then.
The order also requires the attorney general to submit, within 120 days, recommendations “to encourage the private sector” to end similar diversity efforts.
To bully the private sector, you mean.
Update: sure enough, the 1965 executive order did not mention genner idenniny, or sexual orientation either.
Executive Order 11246, signed by President Lyndon Johnson on September 24, 1965, established requirements for non-discriminatory practices in hiring and employment on the part of U.S. government contractors. It prohibits federal contractors and federally assisted construction contractors and subcontractors who do business with the federal government from discriminating in employment decisions on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.
The existing protection was extended to LGB in 2011, T was added in 2012. But this rolls back all employment-related enforcement of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In short, they are ordered to hire and promote by merit (not a bad idea), and are allowed to discriminate against those they assume have less merit (a really bad idea).
That’s not really it though. It’s not necessarily about merit; it’s about dislike, disgust, aversion.
@Opelia:
Well, the point is that, immediately after the “The contractor will not discriminate against any employee …” sentence, the next sentence is:
The “will take affirmative action to ensure …” wording is notable.
Whatever the original intention, the combination of these two sentences has increasingly been interpreted (by the courts and government bodies) to mean that an employer must not only ensure equal opportunities (the first sentence), but also equal outcomes (the second sentence).
That is, if hiring is not pro rata with representation in the population, then the employer is held to be automatically guilty of violating the first-sentence non-discrimination requirement. At least, the onus is then on the employer to get themselves off this hook.
The courts have also done something similar with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was never intended to ensure equal outcomes, but which has increasingly been interpreted by the courts to require that. Of course the 1964 CRA cannot be rescinded by a stroke of the Presidential pen, whereas this EO can be.
The impact of such rulings has been growing. For example, New York required its school teachers to pass a competency test. Seems reasonable enough; we do want teachers to be competent.
But (quoting the WSJ) “at times, over 90% of white test takers passed, compared with fewer than 62% of Black test takers and 55% of Latinos.”
Upshot? The courts awarded $1.8 billion to prospective teachers who had failed the test.
And similar things were happening in many other areas of employment, driven by aggressive suits by Biden’s DOJ.
The problem is that, whenever one sets up a merit test, different racial groups will fail it in different proportions. And, if the automatic presumption is that that implies illegal discrimination, then employers are hamstrung, About the only recourse they have is to drop all standards of merit in employment decisions entirely (Google for how this effects recruitment for US air-traffic controllers).
Hence, people have been arguing for a while that in order to get merit-based race-blind hiring, they first need to nuke this EO 11246. What to do about interpretations of the 1964 CRA is less clear, but at least there one is only talking about interpretations, not the text itself, which does not include “affirmative action” language.
Of course, since the link was to the BBC, you wouldn’t expect them to properly report why the Republicans are against this Johnson-era EO. Instead the report tries to give the impression that the Republicans are against non-discrimination in hiring, whereas it’s actually the opposite: the only way to do non-discrimination in hiring properly, and to treat every individual fairly on their merits, is if one is not trying to hit quotas for all the different identity groups.
One can either discriminate over race, sex, etc, in order to hit quotas, or one can adopt individual-merit-based hiring and not care about “identity” outcomes. But one can’t do both, as this Johnson-era EO attempted to do.
It’s interesting how people almost always assume that ‘merit-based’ hiring means hiring white men. It is coded for that, of course, but I have been in many jobs, and found that the white men are not always the best hire. In spite of that, many of the jobs I was in found ways to manage to fill their staff with white men under one pretext or another. When I was working with disability, they announced once that all fifteen of the new employees they were hiring (all professional level) would be white men. Why? We were low on our quota of white men!
The reality? White men rarely stayed. When I was hired, the new incoming employees were 60% male; one of them was Black. The 40% females also had one person of color. All but one of the men were gone within a year. Why? Because most of them quit, getting higher paid jobs somewhere else (because they had more education? Experience? No…my education and experience was on par with theirs, and some of the women had even more). In addition, they were not meeting quotas, and some of them were not invited to become permanent employees. The one Black man was still there when I left five years later; he was the ONLY Black male in the pool of examiners. The one Black woman was still there. She was the ONLY Black female. There were plenty of people of color working there, enough to ‘meet quota’ – they were mostly working custodial and clerical positions.
White men had been the majority in every class of new employees that came through; only a few lasted out the first year. Of my class of sixteen, only two of the males were still there when I left. Some of them were promoted; white men were the only ones at the top, higher than the lowest level supervisor. Why? Merit? Actually, a lot of the men who were promoted had a lot worse accuracy and completion rates; they promoted them to get them out of the examiner pool because they weren’t good at it. Don’t ask me why white men seemed to be lousy at it; I don’t know. (To be fair, the one Black male often didn’t meet standards, either, but he did meet them often enough to keep his position.)
I have lost many jobs to lesser qualified white males. Yet all I hear is this mantra that we are hiring lesser qualified people because of affirmative action. There is nothing in the affirmative action program that says the employee in the protected category must be hired even if they do not meet the standards. I lost out on one job to a white male who didn’t meet the minimum standards…except for the fact that one of the standards was possession of a penis. I know, because I interned there for two years, and realized quickly that all the women in the office were temps or interns; they made ‘quota’ that way, because as I learned when I was in Human Resources, it was often just a plain count. Do you have the right ratio? Oh, yes, see? So while women actually outnumbered the men there at times, the number of men who were permanent employees was 9:1 woman. The one woman had been working there long enough to be hired before the director had been appointed. He was, by the way, not particularly qualified for the job. He was a friend of the governor.
Rubber band effect. The tighter it’s pulled, the more violently it snaps back.
They probably did a search on key phrases like “affirmative action”, which does appear in EO 11246. On the other hand, if I’m being entirely fair, one could quite easily argue that a policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of specific group membership (rather than in toto) isn’t per se colorblind. (The exception to this would be when the list of groups is exhaustive of all possibilities; e.g., “males and females”.)
As might be expected, the case Coel references in New York was not so simple. There were a lot of factors involved, including one that we are still discussing in education today (well, I’m not, because I retired, but I’ve only been retired a year, so I still know what’s going on). What do the tests measure? Do they measure effectiveness in the classroom? Since the subject matter tests that teachers took didn’t show the same racial disparity, it might be that the failure was due to questions that had nothing to do with what they were teaching. A second-grade math teacher, for instance, really doesn’t need to be able to interpret Andy Warhol’s soup can paintings (hell, I can’t do that and I’ve got more degrees than are good for me. I nearly always fail anything having to do with art, unless it’s something like who painted the Mona Lisa).
There is no agreement on how to measure effective classroom teaching. Measuring student outcomes would seem to be more effective than whether or not teachers know who Andy Warhol is, but I can tell you from experience that there is no agreement on how to measure that, either. Every testing measure for student outcomes I’ve been involved with has been a joke; I suspect most of the teacher exams are the same, but since I taught college, I wasn’t required to take special tests beyond the zillion and a half tests of varying kinds I took to get through school.
And as of 2023, the money hadn’t been paid out, so like the majority of these lawsuits that conservatives get all hot and bothered about, there may never be anyone who collects, and the school district may get to keep their money. I know in environmental violations, it is rare for any huge payout to be made, though they are always breathlessly announced in the press. It’s rare to get the follow up that shows you how the amount was whittled down to nearly nothing, which often still doesn’t get paid out.
Yep, it’s all AOK for Coel and me, after all, we are the default standard – white male, and we do not see discrimination because it never happens to us.
However, if we are honest, and if we have friends or even acquaintances who are not white males, and if we pay attention, we can see that what is easy for us is almost insurmountable to others. Let’s not employ women lest they get pregnant, cannot employ Blacks because even though “we’re not racist”, maybe our customers are, and the way that Gay man dresses is just too far out. Remember that Lesbian we employed who shaved her head and then claimed she was “just supporting her sister during cancer treatments”?
Yes, Coel, you can be as “color blind” as you like to pretend, but there are all sorts of subtle ways to ensure only straight white males get the best jobs. Even with DEI programs, Coels will find a way around.
iknklast:
I’d say it’s less a matter of crypto-racism/-sexism than it is that the job market is a zero-sum game. In that context, affirmative action policies that are pro-X are logically equivalent to anti-non-X. (For example, a requirement that at least P% of employees be X is anti-non-X.) The only time that such policies restrict merit-based hiring is when the currently best-available candidate is non-X. Necessarily, then, the request for more merit-based hiring is a request to hire more non-X candidates. (NB: This assumes there aren’t also numerical minimums/quotas/percentages regarding the hiring of non-X candidates.)
There’s something intrinsically iffy about trying to do a Fourier transform on discrimination and cancel it out with its inverse function, especially when we don’t know what the ideal, unbiased output actually looks like and couldn’t measure it if we did. We can guess, but our guesses are usually ideologically informed.
Rev:
You, I’m pretty sure, don’t know Coel’s biography. It’s more than a little presumptuous to declare that he’s never experienced discrimination.
@iknklast:
Really? Who does that?
Interesting, I’d not gathered that bit. Can you give a link?
Student outcomes is a very bad way of assessing a teacher, since it’ll be mostly about the student (good students with a bad teacher will do way better then poor students with a good teacher).
I agree with you that evaluating who is a good teacher can be hard, though we do need some merit-based standards for teachers.
@Rev David Brindley:
If you’re trying to insinuate that I’m not actually in favour of merit-based hiring, but just want preference for white males then: (1) you are wrong, (2) you have no honest basis fior attributing that to me, and (3) I note your nasty cynicism.
Yes, you picked out part of what I said. I referred to all attempts to measure student based outcomes during my tenure as a joke. In other words, I agree with you, except you left out the crucial control group – good students with good teacher, poor students with bad teacher. In that case, I suspect your poor students with a good teacher will do much, much better than poor students with a bad teacher. Life often doesn’t divide so nicely into a dichotomy. As for the link, I will get that for you, but I am racing off right now to take care of business. Check back tonight or tomorrow.
Thank you, iknklast, for your patience. It seems that, whatever the issue, for Coel, it can be reduced to a simple black and white (I am referring to colours, or the lack of them here not to race) dichotomy. He seems unable to comprehend that a great many matters are very complex. And once again, we’re back with his obsession with IQ, which is, of course, an obsession of many on the oligarchic right and the tech-bros.
Hey, I’m also quite invested in IQ (I imagine that most people that have a score are a bit invested). I’m also interested in how much the weed/alcohol have dented it.
Dear Coel,
Bald statement, but no refutation.
Your posts are self evidently those of one who sees others as lesser beings.
Oh, golleee gee Sgt Carter, you caught me out. Yes, I do have a negative view of you, based on your posting history here. Nothing you have typed above has given me cause to reconsider. Maybe if you showed a little humanity but I honestly believe you lost that a long time ago. Maybe nurture, maybe nature, but a lot of us grew up seeing that the dog eat dog world you advocate does not lead to happy outcomes.
When 12.5% of the US population, including those who work for the billionaires that own Walmart, Amazon, et al, rely on SNAP instead of earned income, maybe you need to look a little harder at root and branch reform of your economy.
Rev#16
Coel is, unfortunately, British; though perhaps he woukd prefer to be called English. But there certainly needs to be a root and branch reform of the British economy, after what the Tories brought about but I fear that will be extremely difficult after the destruction the Tories have wrought upon the British economy.
@Rev David Brindley:
Fuck off Brindley. And I bet you cannot provide a single quote from me that can fairly be interpreted that way.
I’m the one who tries to discuss the actual issues; too many people here seem to want to respond only with personal attacks. You should realise that your issue isn’t with me, it’s with reality.
@Rev David Brindley:
Go on then, quote me advocating for a dog-eat-dog world. You can’t, can you? So you just make things up. And, again, I note your nasty cyncism. I note that you automatically think the worst of anyone not narrowly in line with your own views. It’s a warped and dishonest way of looking at the world.
For the sensible readers here — and yes, there are plenty of sensible and thoughtful readers here — the Free Press have just published this article by Coleman Hughes that answers Ophelia’s questions from the OP.
One quote from it: “Trump’s executive order gets closer to the original intent of the civil rights movement than today’s DEI policies.”
Yes, the Bari’s MAGA sanewashing rag is definitely worth a read… as for me I’m waiting for her “In Defense of Tiananmen Square” article to go up next to “10 Reasons It’s Actually A Good Thing That The US Treasury Is Bankrolling Shitcoin Pump and Dumps”.
The reality is that Wokeism is dead, go Sperg out over your victory on your irrelevant little island while the global Hegemon devours itself.
The thing I think a lot of people miss, is if you look at Project 2025, the whole plan is for a crony government.
Sure we can argue about the social justice aspect of all of this, but we aren’t arguing between a merit based system and a DEI one.
We’re talking about Donald “Put his idiot son-in-law in charge of handling a pandemic” Trump here. Donald “Wants a drunken misogynist to run the military” Trump. Donald “Putting an antivax brain worm infested roadkill bear eater in change of health” Trump.
The only merit Trump appears to care about is loyalty to Trump.
What Trump is doing is eliminating the checks and balances that could get in the way of him stealing. Sure, it may mean that the best person isn’t getting the job, I honestly don’t know, but it is likely also getting in the way of Trump picking some of the worst.
[…] a comment by Bruce Gorton on Vacations for […]
DEI has been mostly used recently as a tool to promote trans ideology in schools, government, and business. I think the original intent has been lost. DEI has been used by the trans cult to communicate the lie that trans people don’t have the same “rights” as everyone else. They do. What they want is to have access to women only spaces and endeavors, and access to children in order to further their ideology, among other things. They ask for priveleges, not rights. With the US government abandoning the DEI directive, I can only wonder if the big tech companies, the ones who most prominently promoted the trans agenda, will follow suit or double down. Particularly the social media ones. We’ve seen Musk’s position, but what about the rest of the hyperwokesters scattered throughout all the tech companies and beyond? What about Mulvaney and Bud Light? Is it over? Trans seeks to be parasitic on everything, and DEI programs are no exception.
I think if the original intent of DEI is to survive, it will have to shed the more absurd and nefarious aspects of it’s policies. It might be able to be reformulated to be less corrupt, but throwing the baby out with the bathwater seems like an effective plan for now. I guess we’ll see how it plays out. It would be nice if the trans cult takeover of everything were to stop. Trans is not a sexual orientation, it is anti-feminist and anti-women, it is illiberal, and it preys on children’s young minds. It’s time to let more common sensical ideas prevail.
twiliter, I agree with your point. I’m not sure how reworking it would look, though, since for most people, it’s so associated with woke that it is illegitimate. I suspect women will have to fight the fight again to claw back our rights, and the same with people of color. And all this because trans made civil rights an easy target.
Yes, and not only civil rights, but anything they can co-opt to their stinking “cause.” Parasites.
I don’t know that there’s an original intent to DEI that isn’t poisonous. DEI just is the parasite on the legitimate causes of civil rights and nondiscrimination. It is the wolf in sheep’s clothing that the shepherd unwittingly defends, even while it feasts on lambs in the dark.
Saying that the original intent of DEI has been perverted is like saying that the original intent of LGBTQ+ rights activism has been perverted. The original intent was LGB rights, not T, not Q, and not the rest of the wifi password. The branding has been so successful that to even speak of the original intent itself—LGB—is to be considered hateful. So it is also with DEI. To speak of the original intent is to be called “a pawn of the Right” and “a charlatan of sorts”.
Coel: We are all OB’s guests here and, as you appear to acknowledge, it is a venue at which progressive and classical liberals have the opportunity to engage constructively in a way which is becoming all too rare – something for which she deserves our thanks. I don’t enjoy reading either persistent denial of good faith or personal abuse, but I would entirely understand if our host drew a line between the two to your disadvantage, though personally I would regret such an outcome. From one of the “sensible readers” please: Cool it!
@Alan Peakall:
Thanks for the advice (genuinely!), though perhaps I could ask for some further advice. How am I supposed to respond?
I have — time after time — advocated an MLK-style identity-blind society in which everyone gets treated fairly on their merits. I make an entirely sensible contribution (#4 and #5) explaining the thinking behind the EO discussed in the OP.
And another poster just attacks me, lying about what I’ve said, saying that what I really mean is that only whites should be hired and that everyone else is a lesser human being — pretty much the exact opposite of everything I’ve said all along — while, of course, giving zero quotes supporting those slurs.
So, how should I respond?
And if I get banned, fine, honestly I’d have no problem with that, but I’m not going to tolerate posters making personal attacks by spewing vile lies about what I’ve said. Do you think I should? I mean, honestly, my response to Brindley was the least he deserved.
Thanks NiV @27 that perspective is reasonable. I think the initial intent (or how it comes across to me) is that there are particular types of unfairness that can be identified and rectified. Maybe that’s the kernel of it, but I also have my doubts, as you and ikn point out, that it’s salvagable.
I like what Cathy Young at The Bulwark has to say on this topic:
Trump’s DEI Crackdown Is a Bad Solution to a Real Problem
Coel, I really don’t want to encroach on our host’s prerogative in moderating tone, but I would hope my personal inclination if I felt myself to have permanently lost the assumption of good faith from certain other commenters, or been subject to mobbing by, or insults from, them, would be to abstain from interaction with them in the hope of keeping open interaction with remaining commenters. Again I would credit OB’s ATL tone and engagement with a wide range of commenters for making such an aspiration merely highly demanding rather than as absurdly impossible as would be the case at some FTB fora.
I don’t think I have anything to add beyond that, and apologise to anyone who thinks I’ve already said more than enough.
No apology necessary.
twiliter: You might notice that “there are particular types of unfairness that can be identified and rectified” is so vague that it could reasonably be said of Russia’s motivation for invading Ukraine.
lol, point taken.