Fair answer, and I’m not gonna pretend I read all hundred pages of it either. But given the range of problems they found, it would have to be a lot of racists. And one place where I think I agree with CRT is the idea that racist attitudes are caused by racist systems, rather than the other way around. In some ways it’s also easier to change a system than to directly change the attitudes of the people in it, as your link demonstrates.
Tangentially, I thought this was kind of funny:
Explicit, uncritical racial stereotyping in medicine is one good example. We have known for many years that race is a social construct rather than a proxy for genetic or biological differences. Even so, recent work has identified numerous cases of race-adjusted clinical algorithms in medicine.
Do we need “biological race”, the same way we distinguish between gender and biological sex?
I’ll pick one I have some experience in, both in Taiwan and the US: Hiring for tech jobs. The typical process first goes through an automated screening system selecting for certain keywords in resumes, and then relies mostly on face-to-face interviews conducted by engineers at the company. Both of these steps have been (objectively) shown over and over again to fail at selecting the best candidates. Both remain, because ultimately white tech bros like to hire white tech bros. People who aren’t white tech bros tend to “not fit the culture” — not because the white tech bros are intentionally racist, but just because they only really know how to talk to white tech bros.
There are other ways of evaluating candidates that rely much less on the personal feelings of the interviewers, and which have been (objectively) shown to pick better candidates even among white tech bro candidates, let alone among the whole pool. Changing the hiring process could be done easily, and without anyone going to implicit bias training.
So instead, ShopCo worked with platforms that emphasized individuality, ethics, and authenticity, among other attributes. The result: it took longer for ShopCo to hire. And because the candidates it ultimately recruited through the latter set of platforms were more junior, they were less skilled and more likely to be laid off when the pandemic hit.
Yeah, I’m not sure what’s going on there, but it’s not what I’d recommend. There’s an argument for stripping personal information from resumes (I expect everyone has seen that study where otherwise identical resumes got different numbers of callbacks based on the candidate name), but I’m not sure it’s really necessary, given that companies today are actively trying to increase their diversity.
Here’s what you do: Take every candidate who meets very basic requirements (a CS degree or a couple years’ work experience, say), and give them a take-home project. I’m keen on the gilded rose for this: they get some existing code and have to add a feature to it. Scope it to 2-3 hours’ work, which can be done entirely at home without even talking to a human. Then have your engineers review the work and give it scores. Hire whoever scores best, and pay them based on their score.
That’s it. No HR interviews, no engineering interviews, and the work they do to qualify is near-identical to the work they’d actually be doing if hired, making it a pretty reliable indicator (unlike in-person whiteboard tests, which tell you nothing about how they’ll perform at the actual job).
It’s simple, it’s cheap, it gets you people who are good at the job, and it’s pretty much impossible to inject any bias into because the reviewers don’t even know whose code they’re looking at.
And yes, I’ve tried it: At my last (Taiwanese) job I built the best engineering team I’ve ever seen by hiring exclusively in this way. US consulting companies like Toptal also hire this way.
The document sounds a lot like NASA is virtue signaling, attempting to appease some in the Biden White House by showing that it is serious about promoting diversity in its workforce and contractors. However, the National Review and others are well advised to worry that such efforts could careen into a full-blown Critical Race Theory (CRT) exercise and all that it would imply.
And mine is that apparently literally any attempt to increase equity and diversity must now be viewed with suspicion because it “might turn into CRT” – something he presents exactly zero reasoning for.
No, the article specifically addresses this. For example:
or this one:
or, and now I’m wondering if you bothered to read it, there is also this one:
The article was simply pointing out that it is possible to go too far, as other organizations have done. The Minnesota Historical Society, for example:
So … NASA put out an RFI on how to increase diversity, and therefore it makes sense to write an article warning of the dangers of CRT because … people who don’t do the reading feel it is important to virtue signal about things they don’t really understand?
