Unless you think that all Black people are disadvantaged. To me, it's a "ruinous empathy" form of racism if you think "Oh look at that poor Black person!" without knowing anything about her background.
That seems like the primary feature at this point.
Their network of friends and knowledge of the government is not the kind of things that one can buy with money normally.
A. Spend a lot of time and effort growing into someone with the skills and social access to be a part of one of those middle-class (or with luck upper-class) families.
B. Spend a moderate amount of time and effort maintaining a position in the lower-middle-class.
C. Spend a small amount of time and effort to fall into what socialists call the lumpenproletariat.
D. Spend an enormous amount of time and effort to gather a group of conscientious and industrious peers to form a new militant group which seeks to take power, trusting them to be rational enough to act effectively and loyal enough not to betray your cause.
E. Join an established militant group.
Why does Microsoft care? Microsoft wants to sell services to various governments, who want to maintain monopsony power on recruiting those who choose path E.
They also want tax revenue from those who choose path A. They also don't want to spend tax revenue on the messes left behind by those who choose path C or D.
"Black people are this percentage of the company. We need to show minorities respect and ensure they're doing well economically by ensuring that we hire a certain percentage of minorities, and then hire the best among them. This is something they fought for through the political system, and it's something every group can benefit from if they ever find themselves under-represented"
I'd be like, well I don't like my asian friend Clive is not getting hired after trying so hard in school, I might disagree with it, but I would at least understand where it's coming from. However how these policies are actually justified is nonstop racism. "white privilege, "You were only hired because of unconscious bias", so on and so forth as people are paraded into mandatory racism training seminars. I'm just sick and tired of the racism from the DEI bigots and the way they parade around as anti-racists honestly makes me want to projectile vomit.
If you presuppose that giving disadvantaged groups an extra chance is a positive (your argument sort of does already) and only use wealth as a factor, isn't it still a net positive to uplift the typically poorer group? Doesn't that rightfully uplift more people than it does "wrongly"?
Why judge people by the groups that were born into when we could be judging them as individuals instead?
https://hbr.org/2017/10/hiring-discrimination-against-black-...
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/african-americans-f...
The discrimination faced by Black Americans is because of their skin color, not their socio-economic status. And while a higher socio-economic status can help to offset that discrimination, we have no evidence it eliminates it.
It's also essentially impossible to anonymize resumes in a way that would provide meaningful distinction between people.
Resume design, for instance, is a fairly strong signal for how a developer might think, or their personal attention to detail and craftsmanship.
You'd be amazed how often we don't even need to read a resume to tell whether someone worth interviewing.
They're a self-reinforcing loop. A lot of racism is affecting socio-economic status (redlining, no generational wealth) and the bad socio-economic status then fuels the continuation of the disadvantaged status alongside racism.
But at the resume level all we're doing is using heuristics to decide who deserves an interview. Are white applicants with a 3.2 gpa more likely to be successful than black ones with a 3.1 gpa? I have no idea. I don't think you do either. Really the only way to find out is to hire some black applicants and compare them which might be what msft is doing.
Point being this whole strive for 'ultimate equality' is going to create victims in its fanatical wake. No perfect method exists and no one wants to be on the losing end. But it is easier for those in a position of affluence to decide who is allowed in, as long as they won't get hurt themselves.
The whole woke DEI idea of people being "disadvantaged" is itself a disempowering notion. It tells people that there is no point making better decisions or trying harder in life, because what you do or don't do doesn't matter, only outcomes matter, and if they are poor someone else will give you stuff for free. It's the ultimate form of emasculation.
We do know that skin color is a decisive factor in discrimination. You suggest to let this continue to happen (do nothing) because some specific individuals of a discriminated skin color do not seem to be discriminated.
So you just need one token black guy, not even in every company, just one, promoted to near executive-level, so that people like you can say "look; if they want to, they can!"
And then you can all go on with your lives pretending you're there because of your merits.
