She wasn't selected because she was a woman of color, she was selected based on her qualifications and she is a woman of color.
Are people on insinuating she was not qualified? Are these people also insinuating that diverse perspectives are not something to be valued?
Leaving aside the obvious pejorative intent behind using the term DEI. Kamala Harris fulfills all of the requirements for the position she was elected.
I think it would be helpful to hear from you what exactly you mean when you decisively label her a DEI hire?
I think this is what they really want to say,
@torbee said it best.
You people just don't expose yourself to good arguments from the opposition and remain ignorant because of it.
Let's do this somewhat analytically.
The functional DEI definition here looks a lot like affirmative action: A filter based on fairness with a minimum threshold of performance required. (can't just pick some random black woman off the street )
1) You have Woman + color as candidate as a selection filter.
2) You have a set of candidates you can choose from. (what the boundaries of your set are or should be, is up for debate to an extent -- we'll agree that Kamala could have reasonably been included in the set since she was a US senator and was running for president -- this wasn't someone picked off the street)
3) You apply the filter in item 1.
4) The set of selectable candidates is narrowed quite a bit.
5) If you had 20 candidates before, and only 4 now... you may have missed out on the best ones where performance was concerned. That's because we used a non performance based filter to narrow.
6) And so you can wonder... did we get the best one?
7) And so you can argue that Harris has been unimpressive, was a lousy candidate in the primaries, and thus was only selected on the basis of fairness given her deficits. Yes, she may have qualified for the pool of candidates, but would have been passed over if you were interested in performance only and didn't filter on fairness.
8) Lots of people think the fairness filter is flawed and don't like it. (see republicans)
9) Lots of people think Harris is a weak candidate. (especially republicans)
10) What the hell do you think they're going to say? They're going to say democrats picked a weak candidate based on a filter that doesn't make sense.
And quite frankly, I have the same concern. If we didn't get the fairness filter would we now have a candidate better equipped to beat Donald Trump?
The more you use the fairness filter the better the chances are that you're going to get sub-optimal output. Why? Because you're narrowing the set of possibilities on an selection criteria that isn't interested in the best possible outcome where performance is concerned.
Many people know this intuitively. I just explained it explicitly. It's a bad practice if what you care most about is performance outcome.
