"Hard Life" ≠ Discrimination
I thought this was a lesson we all learned somewhere between kindergarten and adulthood, but apparently we need a refresher:
Just because life is hard doesn't mean you're experiencing discrimination.
The minute you start talking about inequality in this country, someone's going to tell you about their Uncle John who worked really hard every single day of his life, never got anything handed to him, and still had bad stuff happen. And listen—on a human-to-human level, I totally empathize with Uncle John. I really do. But that's part of the universal human experience of suffering. Life is hard. It is. I have this same conversation nightly with my twins about why they still have to go to school even though they went "all those other days before." Sometimes the most empathetic response to misfortune is simply: man, that sucks. But that's fundamentally different from systematic oppression of certain groups just for who they are.
Should we be tackling poverty in this country? Absolutely. And anyone doing that work, I'm 100% behind. But here's the thing: we can address poverty AND still have inequality across race and sex.
They're two fundamentally different problems that require fundamentally different approaches. DEI programs aren't trying to solve Uncle John's problems—they're addressing an entirely different kind of systemic barrier.