> So instead of discussing ways of making D&I work

Parent comment didn't say anything like that. Please assume good faith in discussions. They said that D&I efforts are more likely to work if focused on other parts of the education/industry pipeline, which seems at least plausible.

> That statement doesn't simply "follow from DEI objectives." Was that bar for performance standards explicit? implicit? or, like a lot of other replies here, hyperbole?

The person simply couldn't do the job and was profoundly incompetent, and the response was to that was to repeatedly be told to spend more time training them. My friend had previously successfully terminated a white employee who was under-performing but turned out to be more competent than this one.