"Why Do You Have A Problem With That!?" - Mark Cuban Argues In Favour of Race-Based Hiring
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In this 9-min clip with Mark Cuban, we discussed one of the most contentious issues in corporate America today: what diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) actually means in practice. Mark argued that DEI is simply about expanding the pool of applicants—recruiting from historically Black colleges or community colleges to reach underrepresented candidates—while still hiring based on merit. I pushed back, pointing out that this definition doesn’t align with how DEI has actually been implemented and promoted by major corporations over the past few years.
As I noted in the exchange, many companies after the 2020 BLM protests explicitly set racial and gender-based “representation goals” — in some cases, clear quotas. Starbucks pledged to achieve 30% BIPOC representation in corporate roles, Pfizer targeted 32% “minority” executives, and Nike promised 30% of its U.S. workforce would be Black. These weren’t just efforts to “cast a wider net”; they were numerical diversity targets that raised legitimate questions about meritocracy and fairness.
The heart of the disagreement was semantic but revealing: Mark equated DEI with outreach and opportunity expansion, whereas I argued that the term has come to represent an ideology of race-based hiring and goal-setting that goes well beyond outreach. Until we define our terms honestly—distinguishing between genuine inclusion and enforced equity quotas—public discourse on this issue will remain confused and polarized.
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Cuban is an arrogant asshole who got lucky. And he proves it everyday with every single word he says
Cuban thinks he's offering some new, innovative approach to "inclusion," but he's not.
In the 1960's, it was called "outreach." Outreach included what Cuban describes - recruiting at places other than the traditional venues - and also meant identifying people from disadvantaged demographics showing some talent and providing them coaching and tutoring to help them reach their full potential.
Nobody, and I mean NOBODY, objects to that. The trouble is, it's a LOT of work and effort for not much results. So then if the objective is to increase the # of minorities hired or admitted to prestigious universities, it's difficult not to resort to the shortcuts that we actually saw until recent Supreme Court decisions made them illegal - admitting black people with SAT scores 400 points lower than whites or Asians who were denied.
That's what they were doing. Evidence from court trials proved it. And when it was outlawed, employers and universities continued to try all kinds of "workarounds" to hiring and admitting the favored groups with lesser qualifications.
It became ridiculous, where they were trying to pretend they were merely doing outreach, while in reality they were hiring and admitting people with objectively inferior scores on standardized tests.