[b6]

This is a harmful way of thinking, unfortunately on the rise lately. Ostensibly to promote fairness and diversity, it encourages us to think more about arbitrary racial categories, hereditary traits, disabilities, etc. Those things about people we were starting to consider less and less significant, we are being encouraged instead to be hyper-aware of.

Whoever decides the categories has the power to decide whether your organization is compliant. For example, suppose by a miracle that your organization is "correctly diverse" with regard to some set of blessed ethnic groups, hereditary traits, disabilities, etc. Well, your organization is almost certainly not compliant with regard to the left-handed, those who can roll their tongues, those with connected earlobes, those with flat feet, etc. Maybe you have the "correct" number of black people, but do you have the correct number of gay black people? Do you have the correct number of gay black women? How do you feel about sexual orientation or autism being blessed categories, but not, say, albinism, hyperhidrosis, or Marfan syndrome?

As a practical matter, how do you suppose someone would show that they were, say, partly descended from Native Americans? Certificate from a genetics testing lab? Are we going to carry cards in our wallets?

That's not the future I want. Your body is not the important part of you. The important part of you is your mind. I won't help build a hyper-body-focused society.

In the future I envision, nobody cares about anybody's supposed ethnicity. Nobody keeps spreadsheets about it. Nobody specifically considers body attributes during college admissions, or hiring decisions, or really, ever, because it's just not important. Let's not support any efforts to make these things more important.

[philbarr]

Whilst you're correct that we shouldn't be worrying about body attributes at all, and I agree with your vision of the future, we still need a way to get from where we are now to where we want to be.

In the meantime the best we've got is to try and make sure we've got some evidence of diversity.

[b6]

> we still need a way to get from where we are now to where we want to be.

It has been happening already. It's as if we've been gradually smoking less and less, and then a movement comes along that tells us that in order to quit, we actually need to smoke more for the foreseeable future.

[pwinnski]

>> we still need a way to get from where we are now to where we want to be.

>It has been happening already.

Citation needed. I think evidence suggests that we've been getting from where we have been to where we want to be precisely because of these kinds of efforts, and the pushback against these efforts has been there at every step of the way.