Diversity of experience is different than diversity of qualifications. I should have specified. No one is hiring unqualified individuals simply because they are “diverse”.
Not caring about color or race is an ideal that I hope we can all reach some day. But right now, the effects of the racism of the past (a time when people cared about color and race in order to give advantages to some at the intentional expense of others) is still very much present. My father was born before Brown v. Board of Ed. My mother was born before the Civil Rights Act. The advantages they had simply by being born white (because of years and years of racist laws and policies) allowed them to get good educations and let me and my sisters, born 20+ years after “we solved racism*” with the civil rights act, to live a life free of poverty. If my parents had been born black, their quality of education would have been different, and the quality of life we enjoyed would have been substantially lower.
I grew up thinking “no need to worry about race, those racists of the past are all gone and can’t hurt anyone anymore.” But the decisions they made continue to hurt those around today. Even assuming things got better since the 50s, there’s still generational wealth missing from disadvantages communities, wealth that people born then would have been available to pass down to their families today, but they were blocked from obtaining by force of law.
I sincerely hope you take the time to read this and understand why people want to include diversity as a part of hiring decisions. They are qualified and experienced enough to know that it makes a difference for many reasons.
Diversity of experience is different than diversity of qualifications. I should have specified. No one is hiring unqualified individuals simply because they are “diverse”.
Not caring about color or race is an ideal that I hope we can all reach some day. But right now, the effects of the racism of the past (a time when people cared about color and race in order to give advantages to some at the intentional expense of others) is still very much present. My father was born before Brown v. Board of Ed. My mother was born before the Civil Rights Act. The advantages they had simply by being born white (because of years and years of racist laws and policies) allowed them to get good educations and let me and my sisters, born 20+ years after “we solved racism*” with the civil rights act, to live a life free of poverty. If my parents had been born black, their quality of education would have been different, and the quality of life we enjoyed would have been substantially lower.
I grew up thinking “no need to worry about race, those racists of the past are all gone and can’t hurt anyone anymore.” But the decisions they made continue to hurt those around today. Even assuming things got better since the 50s, there’s still generational wealth missing from disadvantages communities, wealth that people born then would have been available to pass down to their families today, but they were blocked from obtaining by force of law.
I sincerely hope you take the time to read this and understand why people want to include diversity as a part of hiring decisions. They are qualified and experienced enough to know that it makes a difference for many reasons.
*We didn’t actually solve racism