I want to break down this post a bit, because this topic is often divisive and I'm aiming to be constructive. So, the question I asked, "Is there some legitimacy to this equity thing", and the question you chose to answer, which as best as I can tell is "Is racial discrimination legal?".

Those aren't the same question and I don't think conflating them is constructive. I'm not arguing that companies can do harmful things in the name of diversity. But the goal of equitable outcomes being worthwhile is independent from anyone's feelings about the legitimacy of any particular approach to meeting that goal, and that's what I asked about, and what you didn't reply to. I'd ask you to consider why.

Reading some of your other posts on the topic, you keep quoting a "3/4" statistic, and you've described different practices when asked to describe what they were you've described:

- Explicit racial and gender quotas in headcount (which are flatly illegal and so I doubt)
- Hiring goals in OKRS (which aren't inherently discriminatory, and probably weren't achieved!)
- Giving candidates multiple attempts on interviews in certain cases
- Requiring a certain number of underrepresented candidates to be offered interviews before the candidate can be picked

I want to dig into this last one, because in my experience, this is somewhat common, but only with executive hiring, where often roles aren't open for public application, and this forces executive search companies to make a modicum of additional effort to source and provide diverse candidates to the hiring company. This has, in some cases I've seen, also resulted in executive level positions having open public job postings.

I also want to dig in to something you said in another comment, because I think you're using discrimination in a particular way that's not how most people think of it. Phrased more forcefully, the definition of "racial discrimination" you appear to be using and considering harmful includes practices that are both generally considered legal and generally considered moral.

> Not every form of discrimination involves lowering hiring standards. For instance, imagine I flip a coin whenever a Catholic candidate applies. Tails, their resume goes into the garbage bin, heads and their application process as normal. Does this lower lower hiring standards for non Catholics? No. Does this advantage non-Catholics over Catholic candidates? Yes. It would halve the hiring rate of Catholics, though it doesn't result in any "lowering the bar".

So, I agree that this would lower the hiring rate of Catholics, but under this definition, ending this (clearly) discriminatory practice would lower the hiring rate of non-catholics. If your metric is "it is discriminatory if it harms the hiring rate of some group", then you've created an explicitly zero-sum definition of discrimination, and anything that reduces discrimination against some group causes discrimination against another. In doing so you've baked in an assumption about the correctness of the methodology at some particular time and place that you're measuring against.

You can call that discrimination, and I actually do in a lot of circumstances, but it isn't bad. It's actually a good thing, and we recognize that in a lot of circumstances that discrimination in pursuit of equity is moral and legal and even necessary!

Outside the US, for example, there are explicit racial quotas in a lot of situations, for example in New Zealand[0] there are explicit quotas in parliament to ensure continued native representation, and India has quota systems to help support lower caste individuals in opposition to active discrimination in society by upper-caste folks.

Even in the US, Due to the 1965 Voting Rights Act [1], ensuring representation of minority groups and actively "discriminating" in district drawing to ensure minority representation is both legal and in some cases required. And while the supreme court has defanged the voting rights act in recent years, it still recognizes that looking at race explicitly as part of disparate impact tests makes sense in many cases.

So while I do in fact meet with and talk with lots of people who have different experiences, I urge you to do the same: consider if your interpretation of what is harmful discrimination is in line with common use.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M%C4%81ori_electorates

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965