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.
What I mean by "easy" is "quick and superficial." Hiring the most competent doctors delays achieving the statistic of "more black doctors," so it's not the "easy way" I'm talking about. It takes time for education to come up to par in black communities, because they're poorer for historical reasons. The right (and harder, because it's not doable via a means that the DEI people directly control---hiring) way is to put money where it's needed for education, and "more black doctors" will be a ripple effect achieved without discrimination.
I find it hard to take seriously the notion that anybody serious is arguing for "let's go back to all white dudes" as a response to DEI. Sure...it's going to happen because nepotism and cliques aren't going away. But on the whole, it seems people want to move towards competence/merit being the only factors in play.
Will it get there? Time will tell, but there will invariably be issues. Your execution can be wrong, even if your philosophy is right. But if your philosophy is wrong (we need x% minority engineers, x% trans engineers, x% female engineers), you'd be hard pressed to avoid bad implementation.
"We are having a hard time hiring all the people we want. It doesn't matter what they look like" John Carmack
This isn't restricted to tech.
"I'm French when I score, Arab when I don't" - Karim Benzema.
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.
OP posits that any non-white person in a position of responsibility is going to be blamed as a "DEI hire" if something happens under their watch regardless of their actual competence, because that's the kind of headlines that drive engagement with a certain audience. And I think that's a justified fear - just look at the current brouhaha over California fires.
What is wrong with helping poor people get better primary education? What is wrong with making university cheaper and more accessible?
These types of things should help black people, as well as hispanic, asian, or white people that start with a disadvantage.
Also, society can tackle problems like the study time gap https://fburl.com/oa3uenrr
The claim is simple: using words to mock a group, hurts that group.
This is still true when the group is one that you consider to "hold almost all the power".
Holding power is irrelevant to the harm caused by actions like insulting people or discriminating against them.