“DEI Hire”

A semantic exploration of Schrödinger's Diversity Definition applied to Kamala Harris

The great culture war shitbag brigade this week tied itself in knots over the phrase “DEI Hire.” Particularly, whether various Vice Presidents count as one. The problem I’ve discovered while attempting to engage in this discourse, is nobody on either side seems to know what a “DEI Hire” even is. By some definitions, Joe Biden himself literally stated up front that Kamala Harris was a DEI Hire. By other definitions, she’s obviously not. And many of the people screaming at each other about DEI Hires are in fact screaming right past each other because they’re talking about different things. DEI Hires are either competent or incompetent or racist to use or racist to oppose, depending on your definition. 

Let’s talk about what “diversity” even is before we move on to what the phrase “DEI Hire” might mean, and speak about the implications on various Vice Presidents including Kamala Harris. But first, let’s get all the pandering out of the way.

Pandering

The truth of the matter is that VP picks aren’t jobs at all, they’re just placeholders in case someone shoots the president, which is a necessary position in the USA because we shoot our presidents quite a bit. But nobody picks their VP on the presumption that they’re going to get shot one day, because if they get shot then who cares anyway? Everyone picks them to try and change the vote counts by a half a percentage point in their favor, so every Vice President selection in recent memory has basically been just a magical pandering stick. “Kamala Harris is black and a woman, I’m a woman and/or black and therefore I’ll vote for her because of the most superficial reason possible” is certainly something most people don’t think, but a small percentage might, and maybe that makes or breaks an election in a tight race. It’s been this way for decades. It’s also why everyone thinks Kamala is going to pick a white man as VP, which we will discuss in detail later. She’s obviously not the only one. “JD Vance grew up poor, I’m poor.” “Sarah Palin has big boobs, I like boobs.” (I do in fact like boobs.) And so forth. Something about Dan Quayle and potatoes seems pertinent. But let’s pretend for a moment that a Vice President isn’t a magical pandering stick whose official duties largely amount to making vague speeches and staying alive longer than the President and pretend instead that it’s an actual job. To define “DEI hire” we would first need to know what the hell Diversity means.

Diversity

Luckily, HWFO figured that out (or not) several months ago. Variously, “diversity” either means “black” if the Starbucks barista is a jerk, or “not white” if you’re Hollywood or an Oregon school board, or “not white or Asian” if you’re a Harvard or UNC admissions officer, or “far from the national mean” if you’re autistic, or “the closest lingual approximation to the suburbs of Babel after the tower fell” if you’re a New York City journalist trying to squeeze white foreigners into the diversity calculation. More on that, with mathematical support, can be found here:

All of the definitions in the prior article involve race and gender, so clearly “Diversity” in this context means including race and gender among the factors when making a hire.

“DEI Hire” (1): A hire that promotes DEI

When the Google AI farms all its available resources and compiles them, it describes DEI programs like this:

Perplexity, which I think is a much better AI engine, thinks this:

I’m not huge on believing AI can answer a specific question with a specific answer, but they’re quite good at describing what most people believe because they developed their knowledge bases by farming large sets of data. Both of these summaries mention “hiring practices.” Google’s AI doesn’t give a reference, but the Perplexity reference states explicitly that hiring practices might include blind resume adoption to reduce racial bias, but also actively recruiting underrepresented candidates. Websites such as blackjobs.com and diversityjobboard.com serve this niche, and catering to diverse hires in order to specifically increase a level of diversity at a company must necessarily mean hiring more diverse candidates.

So if you have a diversity rate (whatever that means to you, see above) of 15% at a company, you implement a DEI program, and your diversity rate goes to 20% then 5% of the company, or 25% of the total number of “diverse employees,” are DEI Hires by definition. They must be, because they were hired as a result of a DEI program. It’s tautological. And they would be so whether their level of competency and technical expertise was poor or outstanding. 

You wouldn’t necessarily know which ones were “DEI Hires” unless a manager were foolish enough to tell everyone in advance they were going to post a job and say, for instance, “this job is only for a woman and I’m building a list of black women to choose from.” In the United States, that would be illegal. But if someone did do that, we would know with 100% certainty that that specific hire was a DEI Hire by the most basic definition.

QED. By the most normal, basic, and obvious definition, Kamala Harris was a DEI Hire for Vice President by default, according to Joe Biden himself. But is that really what the right wingers mean when they say “DEI Hire?” Maybe not.

“DEI Hire” (2): A hire that promotes DEI by hiring someone incompetent or uncredentialled

Rational resistance to DEI programs flows from the idea that introducing other factors to the hiring process unrelated to competence will necessarily reduce the competence of the team. For jobs which require a small amount of competence, a DEI initiative might not matter, but for jobs which require a large amount of competence, and for which there are not enough competent diverse candidates available, “DEI Hires” must reduce the net competency of a team by mathematical certainty. This fear may not matriculate for daycare workers or garbage men but might for brain surgeons, depending on the available number of diverse brain surgeons. But Vice Presidents are a special case, which curiously bends more towards garbage man than brain surgeon.

When right wingers use the “DEI Hire” phrase as an attack, they’re inferring that the hire in question was hired only for their “Diverse” qualities (whatever those are, see above) and not because they can competently do the job, or because they have the appropriate credentials to do the job. As discussed above, a Vice President’s job is mostly to sit around, make vague speeches, and wait patiently to see if the President gets shot. I could do that job and so could you, just as we both could be garbage men and neither of us could probably be brain surgeons, so competency doesn’t matter. On to credentials.

When you take a glance at the credentials for the Vice President candidates this century, it is a wall of Senators, House Representatives, State Governors, and one Secretary of Defense.

As a former senator at the time, Kamala Harris was just as credentialed as any other person to do the relatively easy job of Vice President. Therefore Kamala does not meet the 2^nd definition, of someone incompetent to be VP (nigh impossible) or not credentialed (she was).

“DEI Hire” (3): legit racist dog whistle

A “racist dog whistle” is a left-wing term for words that seem normal but allow racially prejudiced people to be racially prejudiced without actually saying explicitly prejudiced things. I normally don’t bother chronicling these things here on HWFO, but during the Great Broken Boeing Jets Fiasco of 2024 I saw a lot of Twitter traffic, and then later right wing media articles, blaming “DEI Hires” for the broken jets. To my knowledge, no single employee or group of employees were ever singled out for having caused any given failure, so the gender or race of the failures is unknown. Could be white, black, yellow, or orange as far as anyone actually knows. The people who yelled “DEI Hire” first presumed that the jet failure was due to the workmanship of a DEI Hire by any of the above definitions with no actual knowledge of the fact, and further presumed that the same failure would not have happened without a DEI program which caused the hire. I’ve lived in the south my entire life, and “it broke so a black dude must have built it” is textbook racial prejudice, without visible justification or excuse. Effectively, they’re piggybacking on the rational statistical justification in “DEI Hire (2)” above to say prejudiced things to their friends or troll on the internet.

 Is some of that going on with Kamala? I’m sure.

“DEI Hire” (4): Brings viewpoint diversity to the team

A repeated theme among the DEI literature is the presumption that teams comprised of more diversity (see definition confusion above) have better results. Some studies support this presumption while others do not. The DEI folks take the first position, so a “DEI Hire” may mean a hire which “brings racial or gender viewpoint diversity to a project team,” presumably to extract these benefits. By this definition, which is supported by DEI literature, not only is Kamala Harris a “DEI Hire,” but the white male she will surely pick as her running mate will also be a DEI Hire.

And wouldn’t that be some shit?

As almost always happens with these culture war outbursts, the Schrödinger's Truth is that Kamala Harris, and perhaps her new very-likely-to-be white male VP pick, are at once both DEI Hires and Not DEI Hires depending entirely on the semantics.