A DEI effort I advocated for
A commenter on YouTube tried to convince me that DEI programs are racist and cause unqualified people to be hired.
I thought i had a good reply:
if a DEI program is causing unqualified people to be hired, then that's a bad dei program. But you can't reasonably write off the entire concept just because there are anecdotes of bad implementations.
For an example of a DEI effort i advocated for - i helped organize a local pridefest & i surveyed folks there for feedback. One man commented that there weren't a lot of people of color. My town is like 25% black and we have a notable Hispanic population. I agreed that most of the attendees were white & the racial makeup didnt reflect our broader community. One black woman i talked to had only juuust heard about pride fest because her job asked her to table for it.
So i advocated that for this year, we make more of an effort to market to black folks. That would include emailing pastors at black churches, spending ad money on radio programs with more black listeners.
Without that effort to reach black folks, we fall into our default - reaching out to people we know, most of whom are white, and getting on radio shows that have predominantly white conservative listenership (bc we, the mostly-white board, are familiar with those stations but not the black ones)
I will say, it's also important that we include this DEI effort to reach white conservatives, as they're also less likely to be part of our personal social networks that might hear about it more organically, and i don't want conservatives left out either.
Its just a matter of realizing that our default is to market to a particular community (queer, white, liberal communities), and that to reach other people, we need a little extra effort.