We’re already seeing DEI weaponized. Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not. Organizations will be risk adverse and only hire the most boring white dude they can find from central casting. Whatever you want to say about diversity initiatives this will be a pretty terrible outcome.
That sentiment ("any mistake is because they're a DEI hire") is obviously wrong. But didn't DEI open itself up for that accusation by lending it some truth? It's a fact that black doctors have lower GPAs than Asian doctors on average.
I think a lot of people would argue against DEI because it takes the easy way out of a real problem. The result we want is more black doctors, but the way you should get to that is not changing standards that are not inherently racist.
The easy (and right) way out was to hire the most competent doctors, not the blackest doctors. I don't want more black doctors, I want the best doctors, regardless of their skin color. If you want more black doctors, you should train better black doctors. However, if you're going to do that, don't be surprised when white trainees band together to work harder too. If it's fair for your side, it's fair for every side.
I have no idea why we went backwards from "discrimination based on skin color is never okay" to "it's okay if they're black" but there's no reason not to simply recognize the mistake, fix it, and move on.
If you are giving scholarships or subsidies to black teenagers so they can eventually get into a university, that’s also DEI, so better subsidise their families so they can get a better primary education and upbringing… but that’s also DEI.
So you keep going back and the “solution” is basically to do nothing and keep the status quo.
Looking at this in terms of race is misguided. Don't do anything for "black people," just help "poor people" get better educations by giving more money to poor schools. A lot of "poor" schools are actually black schools, but not all, so more than just black people will benefit; and not all black people are poor, so we won't waste resources on those who already have them.
Defining DEI as "doing anything about the problem" and then saying that DEI opponents therefore don't want to do anything about the problem is a lazy bait-and-switch that I wish we would all recognize and stop doing.