If so, what is the plan to achieve that goal? Don't we achieve it by actually acting that way as much as possible? That's what makes sense to me.
Suppose we, in the name of equality or diversity or fairness, actually elevate the importance of bodily attributes like ethnicity and sex, deliberately considering them during hiring, and build that practice into our culture. Having practiced doing it wrong for however many years, will we someday decide it isn't needed anymore and get rid of it?
What is the historical justification for the effectiveness affirmative action? Certainly, countries like Malaysia and South Africa with extreme disparity seem to have mixed results at best.
I agree that pretending ethnicity/sex are not visible, is not the same thing as making ethnicity/sex invisible. But actually implementing enrollment and employment laws or policies that hide this information from decision makers could make it nearly invisible.
That's actually not the fundamental problem though. Even if you managed to a perfectly even proportion of middle class stem graduates from 1st and 2nd tier universities represented on your payroll, you'll still end up with a monoculture. Not because of some hard to pin down unconscious bigotry, but because little has been done to eliminate class from society, and social class is a big factor in a persons access to education and the quality of their childhood.
Poor, working class women have less work opportunities than men, as less educated ( religious ) working class people tend conform to traditional gender roles more than middle class people, well paid working class jobs require more physical strength, and unlike middle class mothers, working class mothers cannot afford childcare or help with housework while working or studying. Like ethnicity, class is almost hereditary so is easily confused with ethnicity in statistics.
Making the statistics look better by hiring proportionally more middle class minorities is a face saving exercise, not a solution.
And the assumption that minorities can only be hired by insufficient scrutiny is not a very enlightened attitude. Perhaps the company can look really hard for qualified candidates that help balance the workforce. How about that?
I agree that real progress is the right way to evaluate hiring/ admissions programs. Do qualified people end up in a diverse student/worker population? Then you're doing it right.
We're already factoring these things into decisions whether we want to or not. I don't see anything weird about saying that we should change how we do so, as a step towards getting rid of it altogether.
I think that as long as we have large discrepancies in how many people with or without a particular attribute are in a particular profession, we'll have subconscious biases in evaluating who's good at that profession. If you spend your whole life in an environment where almost all the best programmers are purple people, you'll have a hard time overcoming the notion that purple people are generally better programmers. Pretending not to notice color will simply persist the status quo. If we deliberately include more orange people for a time, then we may be able to overcome that.
We're all familiar with the possibly apocryphal experiment of five monkeys, a ladder, and an electric shock - with the end of the experiment being five monkeys that have never been shocked, but their behaviour is changed. I think we all like to think we've evolved above this kind of manipulation, though I also suspect we each have stories of having worked in professional environments, staffed by evidently smart people, where we observe this same phenomenon.
(Aside -- it's sobering to consider that the people we've worked with may have stories about such effects operating upon us.)
Anyway, point being that while you may be correct in the assertion:
> It's rarely possible to achieve a goal merely by pretending
> you've already achieved it.
Do you think that may have a positive effect?
I'm reminded of the Garbage Dump Troop - a fascinating story, told in many places, but here's a succinct explanation of the effect:
http://bobsutton.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/the-baboon-tr...
Unsurprisingly, alpha males usually don't find the story charming. ; )
It seems to me that if you want to get to a state where diversity just happens by not consciously thinking about race, you need to first get to a state where diversity happens, let it sit for a while, then relax it. I don't see how it's supposed to work if you just stop deliberately discriminating against people and otherwise let things take their course. It seems like trying to achieve flight by making airplane noises and thinking real hard about being up in the air.
Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly the same area as a white family making $30k.
This family is also much more likely to have family that has gone to prison due to previous racist institutions, and less likely to have had 3 generations of parents having gone to Stanford.
So sure, race gets ignored, but do you think people will start ignoring all the other social signals? Even if you ignore everything else, being born to a white family in itself means you inherit centuries of advantages
This is the justification behind affirmative action. Even if it might not be "fair" when looking at an individual case, its also pretty unfair when a kid just happens to be born to a family that has had opportunity robbed from them until extremely recently.
Your end goal might be laudable, but the path to reach it requires corrections
Currently a black family making $100k will live in roughly
the same area as a white family making $30k.
I don't doubt this figure could exist at some time pre-1990, but I don't understand how this could possibly be the case since the start of the housing bubble that burst in 2008 in which many many firms pretty much threw out all prejudices in the pursuit of money as people tried to source any and all loans to sell Wall Street. They not only threw out prejudices, they actively overlooked issues that might correlate with and work against some identity groups like credit rating and earning power.
>Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000.
(From http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...)
If you think it's a good goal, how would you would try to achieve it?
Obviously in combination with "magically getting rid of all racist/sexist thoughts".
How does acting like the problem doesn't exist solve the problem? If that's not what you mean, then do you mean we should all just suddenly stop being racist/sexist/bigotted/etc? Just like that? How would that work? How do you get your neighbor to go along with that? Or white middle manager, who means well but is uncomfortable hiring people of certain ethnicities or sexualities because of "culture fit"? It seems that anyone willing to do what you are saying, if I'm understanding it correctly, is probably already of the belief that a world without racism/sexism/etc would be better, and already behaves in the manner you suggest. In which case, we still live in a fucked up world and system where these things are actually still big problems.