Why We Need Detribilization

 Daniel Greenfield has published a piece entitled "DEI Detribalization," which argues that, in a complete inversion of the original goals of the civil rights laws, "[t]he great objective of DEI was to tribalize our institutions, recruiting government and corporate employees into affinity groups based on their race, sex, sexuality and other factors, and then defining institutional goals around the ‘right’ tribal mix through selective hiring and promotions." Unsaid was that this tribalization was intended to freeze out one particular group: white men.

    In any event, Greenfield notes that the "Government and other institutions stopped being merit-based or democratic, and came to reflect the tribal coalition politics that had come to define the Democratic Party’s urban machines." And both government and corporations "become equally tribalized with blocs of employees that saw it as their mission to defend and promote members of the same group above their stated jobs." "That is why it’s not enough to kill DEI," he continues, but "to tear it out of governments and universities, and to closely scrutinize corporate misuse of DEI, but we must ‘detribalize’ the system." That is, he argues, return to a tribal neutral society. 

    But is going back to the old days of "color blind" really going to work? Greenfield notes that it will be hard to convince people that the "anti-racism" racism they regard as a virtue is no longer a virtue, and those converted to the DEI tribalization will continue to covertly discriminate. 

    From what I've read, one of the groups that is most blatant about tribal hiring practices are Indians in the tech sector. Alan Schmidt, in his piece "On Indians," describes his experience working with groups of Indians. When he lived and worked in India, it was mostly fine--other than the filth, crime, etc., that came with living in India. 

    The ones who flew into the United States on H1B visas, however, were a far different story, and begins the modern saga of ethno-narcissism and shameless cheating. While our team in India was the utmost of professionalism, that can’t be said for many of their compatriots. The 2010’s saw a huge influx of Indian visa holders flying into the country, largely ones who had no business doing so. One H1B contractor we received was a whole different level of incompetence. His first code check-ins were so wrongheaded they didn’t even compile, seemingly just copy-pasted from Stack Overflow. We had to constantly hold his hand through solving the issues in the code review until someone had enough and just did it himself. We asked our lead to delegate him more menial tasks, which he obliged. His next task was to update a JIRA script to automatically change status when an item was filled out. It was literally a two-line code change. He made no progress for two weeks, stating he was “looking at the documentation”. Then he called in sick for a week. Then we guided him through the solution, and he still fucked it up. Then he called in sick for another week. Again, we did the job for him, and he asked us to email the code so he could check it into Github under his own name. We refused.

    He “resigned” and left for India. The next one we got from India was marginally better, but was let go after her short contract expired. After that HR stopped hiring from that contracting firm.

    If the issue with H1Bs just extended to some lousy employees that cheat the system, it would be an annoying but workable problem. My next project, where our company had a joint project with a major automotive manufacturer, showed a far more insidious side. The project manager was Indian, and he originally had a small team that slowly grew as the project expanded. Every week we would see different names in meetings, distinctly Indian. It struck me as quite a coincidence that every expert they hired in was from this particular ethnic group, something not lost on the team, though we never explicitly said it. At the end there was a total of one white guy and about twenty Indians. A few engineers were very good, better than I was, but not all were competent, and it was clear the project manager was building his own little empire.

 Needless to say, when the project collapsed and the automotive company scurried to hire people laid off by the subcontractors, all the hires were Indian--not a single white person--according to the author.

    Schmidt concludes (emphasis added):

    Overall, my experience was a mixed bag. According to online sentiment, this is better than most. When you open the floodgates the good people, the ones you can trust, the ones who learn to think like westerners, dwindles. As the green cards expand from a few thousand to a hundred thousand, you start to see the corruption India is rife with, where people are all-too willing to cheat, lie, and engage in flagrant nepotism to get themselves and their friends ahead.

    Still, I have deep respect for a people that sticks together. The wild colors in their culture and long, festive celebrations long into the night are, while not my cup of tea, something to be respected. However, those strange, foreign traditions, their willingness to enter tribal politics above social norms, and capability of creating little fiefdoms that exclude Heritage Americans make them a danger to my children who will inherit this country. If I went to India and began a nepotistic parallel system to benefit American expats, the Indian Government would throw us all out without blinking, and rightfully so. So why does our own government treat us like immoral racists for wanting our own institutions for our own progeny without being forced to share it with a people who don’t share Western values?

    If they don’t want to follow Western norms, they can follow their own norms in India. The good engineers who worship foreign gods can be good engineers in India. It’s true we will miss out in some talent when we do this, and that’s okay. We are missing recruiting talent among our underemployed white population by design. I sponsored capstone projects for Computer Science seniors, and my largely white teams were astounding in every respect and showed how shameful and out-of-touch Vivek’s screed on Twitter was. These guys are hungry, think outside the box, and do more than study like drones for a standardized test. This was a mid-tier college, so the talent pool we are ignoring at home is clearly immense. This also doesn’t go into how many good engineers are totally wasted in corporate America due to management thinking every one of us is the same cog, looking at spreadsheets instead of trusting our top talent.

    Luckily, even the most ardent Civic Nationalist and creedal American understands the game being played now. They understand you don’t import millions of foreigners simply for cheap labor at the expense of the native population and understand you can only import so many people in a country rife with corruption and ethnic solidarity before you find yourself disenfranchised in your greed for cheap labor. The go-to “racist” attack is falling on deaf ears as they see an imported people clearly unwilling to play by the social norms of their new country.

    I wish all my previous Indian co-workers well. I wish all the people of India well. I wish all Indian citizens living in the United States well, but I don’t want any more of your here. Simply put, the well-being of my children trumps the well-being of your ethnic cohort, just like you believe the well-being of your ethnic cohort trumps my family’s well-being. It’s nothing personal. That’s why we have separate countries.