[FloorEgg]

> it's not like there were DEI advocates out there giving guides on how to break the law

I think you're very mistaken. Not only were their guides, but there were federal regulations mandating that the laws be broken. It is/was a mess.

[judahmeek]

What are your sources?

[xdennis]

Here's an example: the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 allocated grants to help restaurant owners. It did so on a racist basis: if the restaurant is owned primarily by women, veterans, or the "socially and economically disadvantaged".

There was a trial. The government lost. https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca6/21...

[epistasis]

That is not an example of DEI advocates giving guidelines on how to break the law.

That is Congress passing a law distributing grants in a way that was determined to be illegal, quite different! And in fact there are long standing government contracting preferences of that sort, from long before DEI was a term or something that corporate America sought.

[tremon]

I fail to see any difference between "congress passing a law that is in violation of another law" and "federal regulations mandating that laws be broken". Can you explain how these situations differ quitely, other than that "regulation" and "law" are different words?

[epistasis]

The difference was an incentive grant program that was found to be discriminatory, versus regulations which dictate how private entities act. This a pretty big distinction.

It's an especially big distinction when the question was for sources of DEI advocates handing out instructions to corporate decision makers no how to break the law. It's not even remotely connected.

[judahmeek]

Regulations are made by federal agencies.

Laws are made by Congress.

[FloorEgg]

The federal regulations... It's not hard to find if you go looking...

[judahmeek]

Then it shouldn't be hard for you to say something other than 'do your own research'

[FloorEgg]

Actually it took me almost an hour to re-do a portion of the research and lay it out, which I did further down the thread, if you care to look.

Also you didn't ask me to link you to my sources, you asked me what my sources were. I answered your question directly in the best way I could at the time.

Expecting an internet stranger to spend an hour digging up sources for you, when you don't ask respectfully or with any inclination of curiosity comes off as combative - I am not here to debate, I am here to discuss. If you are genuinely curious, take 30 seconds to scroll down and find the other comment I made that took me an hour to put together.

[judahmeek]

I appreciate that you took the time to follow through with sources to support your claim.

You & I definitely have different definitions of "not hard to find", however.

[FloorEgg]

I guess so, but it's relative. An hour isn't hard if you're driven by curiosity, but it is if it's a chore you're doing for someone else.

[FloorEgg]

I became aware of the legal contradictions last summer and spent a few hours doing searches and reading through the relevant regulatory language for a few industries. I don't have all the references handy.

I don't work for you. It's not my job to do research for you. If you're genuinely curious and interested in the truth it won't be hard for you to find. Literally go search and read the regulatory language in a few major industries. Start with the department of education. It doesn't seem like you're curious though, it seems like you're combative.

[epistasis]

That's fine, of course you don't work for anyone else! But you are also not going to convince anyone else by being vague and refusing to give any specifics.

Usually when somebody makes broad vague assertions of evidence but refuses to back it up, I find that they are either mistaken about their experiences and that their take aways do not really follow from their primary evidence. Though usually it's those on the more DEI side that say "I'm not responsible for educating you" that make these mistakes! In the past year I'm seeing it from people that think DEI is about discrimination, so it's an interesting evolution. The argument is still unconvincing, no matter who says it. And again, I'm not saying you must produce anything for anybody else, I'm just saying that you end up looking like you don't have anything to actually produce.

[SR2Z]

See Brigida v Buttigieg, if you want a spectacularly dumb example of how bad a DEI program can get. These are not hard examples to find, although I will concede that the "post-truth" anecdotes from the anti-woke camp can lead to a lot of cruft to sift through.

[FloorEgg]

Actually, I work for many people: My customers, my colleagues, my family. I just don't work for strangers on HN.

My mistake was answering judahmeek's question directly. They asked "What are your sources?" and I answered with the truth, that my impressions came from reading the regulations myself. Instead I should have just not replied at all, because I didn't have the time then to go re-do the research and find all the links. It's not like I save every link I visit when exploring my own curiosity. I am not trying to get some paper published here, just trying to understand whats going on and occasionally share what things seem like to me on HN. Also if they had said something like "This is shocking to me, can you point me where to look into this for myself" I would have probably waited and made a more constructive response.

I hope you appreciate that I just took time out of my day to do this for you, primarily because I found your response (in contrast to judahmeek's) reasonably respectful.

What I noticed when I looked into this last year was that regulatory implementations of the affirmative action executive order 11246 continuously increased and seemed to hit a couple inflection points. I think one was in 2000 and one was in 2021, but there may have been more. I didn't save all the sources that I read to give me the impression I got last year, but after spending about 30 min trying to find at least some of them, it wasn't hard to start to see the picture again.

Note that there is a lot of disparate facts here that paint a picture, and they will paint different pictures depending on the stance the reader starts with before engaging. When I explored this last time, I came at it with curious skepticism. The picture they painted for me, was that something that was well intentioned (affirmative action) came with an assumption: if organizations hire blindly based on merit, over time the distributions of their workforce will match the distributions of the pool of applicants applying to work there. To implement affirmative action these organizations need to include everyone in the pools of applicants, which may require disproportional outreach to invite minorities. Based on this assumption, recommendations were made into outreach programs and requirements were set to measure outcomes. Over time the outcomes didn't match expectations, so regulatory pressure was increased. As the regulatory pressure increased, it put more pressure on all levels within these organizations to take action beyond just outreach programs. So what was federally mandated across many industries specifically was race, gender, sexuality reporting and making plans to reach distributions representative of the broader population. Given this accountability set by federal regulations, and decades of efforts to try to solve the problem with outreach and merit based hiring not leading to the expected outcomes, efforts naturally expanded beyond outreach into all relevant decisions (hiring, promoting). That is how you get people being hired and promoted based on race, gender, sexuality instead of merit. (The exact opposite of the original intention).

For example in Title 41: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-41/subtitle-B/chapter-60/... See 60-2.16 placement goals

Federal contract compliance programs https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2014/12/09/2014-28...

FAR 52.222-23 https://www.acquisition.gov/far/52.222-23 Construction firms must set goals for gender participation in workforce

SEC Release no 34-92590 https://www.sec.gov/files/rules/sro/nasdaq/2021/34-92590.pdf Publicly traded companies that don't have at least two minorities on their board risk being delisted from exchanges

What I remember from last year as most shocking were Department of Education regulations and NSF incentives, but I can't find those primary sources now. The NSF website seems gutted. What I recall was that NSF set criteria in grant awards to incentivize institutions to have a diverse workforce. I can find evidence of this from secondary sources, but not the primary source I remember seeing last year. Similarly what I remember, is that the DOE mandated DEI reporting and planning and tied it to federal funding/support. The effect was that leaders would put pressure on the organization beyond just job placement recruitment/outreach. The reporting and accountability focused on diversity and representation throughout the entire organization, and so the "plans" and more importantly implications would extend beyond just outreach and impact placement decisions from hiring, to special training / career acceleration programs and promotions.

I think it crossed a line for some people in the years following 2021 (EO 13985) when these regulations were expanded to include factors related to peoples sexual orientation and preferences. Once some manager who was just trying to get through their quarter and hire the candidate that will the do best job has to forgo what seems like the best candidate in favor of some other candidate because of how they chose to identify or who they like to have sex with, well... yeah it was getting ridiculous.

Let me be extremely clear that I don't condone discrimination. I think we should do our best to support everyone to thrive. We just have to be careful about confusing responsibility with privilege, and respect how hard it is to design incentive systems that actually produce the desired outcomes.

You can look at the evidence that I am presenting here and call it weak and argue against it. Or you can consider that I dug this up in 30 min on my lunch break as a favor to you, as someone with no motive other than curiosity and concern.