I think DEI’s main obstacle is terrible branding. A different label may have been less triggering and harder to manipulate.
There is also that terrible cartoon with the 3 people standing on different sized platforms. That probably hurt the cause more than anything.
You’d see an Asian woman on the mavs as soon as she was good enough to help them win a game? Anybody can become a professional basketball player. I’m pretty sure the NBA is hiring if you’re good enough.
I think DEI’s main obstacle is racists who would oppose it under any name.
Yep, first whiff of “too many middle aged white males” was always going to send a whole lot of John Deeres into orbit.
Ok, fine, let’s call branding obstacle #2.
If you have to brand it, it automatically makes people suspect it’s bullshit. Maybe it’s better to win the arguments on a more fundamental level before unveiling the three letter acronyms. Otherwise you let the Elons win with “lol DEI” levels of debate.
Teaching Race Under Multiple Perspectives
That’s not fundamental. You have to find some common ground with people before you can make any progress. Like I think Cuban can get Musk to make some concessions because they actually have similar concerns. Example:
My goal would be to incite people like Musk into a massive over-reaction and find common ground with people who see Musk as increasingly abhorrent.
I get that and I’m not entirely unsympathetic. I think Musk will eventually screw up on his own because he’s addicted to risk. My hope is to minimize the damage he does to the rest of us.
That seems like you’re falling into a trap, though. Short Asian female NBA-quality power forwards aren’t available and everybody knows that. We want stuff like overall fairness in hiring and compensation and on the job treatment. Basic respect for everyone. Simple stuff that gets lost in the fight over slogans. I don’t want to give Elon any points for that argument.
Yeah, it feels vaguely analogous to saying, “Of course all lives matter, but…”.
I mentioned in another thread that my company measures stuff like average compensation for men vs. women and under represented group employees vs. “non-UREs” (our comically polite way of saying “white people”), and we also look at things like promotion rates and pay increases and performance ratings granted, etc. This does really force the anti-DEI crowd to put up or shut up about this stuff:
This? She’s a person
A better analogy to what Cuban is saying would be to a sport that has massive barriers to entry for the development of talent. Racing comes to mind, since you have to have access to expensive machinery from a young age to develop and even have a chance to be identified as a talent. Wakeboarding is similar, too.
Cuban strikes me as a less talented millennial graduate of the Buffett school of PR management. He desperately wants to be seen as some kind of common sense truth telling guy, but the vibes are off.
His assertion the sick subsidize the healthy in health care is transparently insane.
imo the trap is that the elons/miles chon’s of the world are trying to push the narrative that the players are the only part of the organization that is the mavericks, when in fact they are probably the smallest part.
so apparently they suspended the account so you can no longer block it, but that doesn’t stop the Ads that have been placed. It actually makes them SUPER UNBLOCKABLE ADS.
so a new advertising strategy has been unlocked.
The counter to what you are saying is that we wouldn’t give a pass to an organization where upper management was all white, while all the minimum wage workers (of whom there are far more) were POCs and then claim they were doing a great job with DEI.
