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How is this different from conservative commentators saying “diversity is code for anti-white”? It’s the same rhetorical game.
More generally, I think reactionaries are too obsessed with black people. Black people are unlikely to make up more than 15% of the American population any time soon. AA birth rates have converged with the white rate. In South Africa, black people are the great majority of the population. In America, they likely never will be. Black people have been in the US longer than many Europeans, and have nothing much to do with the large scale demographic change that has occurred since the 1970s. Ultimately, any pro-black affirmative action, state support etc will always have to be passed with the assistance of the majority of the rest of the population, whether that is white or latino or a mix of both. Issues with race relations that exist between black and white Americans are largely separate to mass immigration, and would exist in the same way even if America had remained 85% white.
One is true and the other is false.
"Diversity is code for anti-white" is based on the logic that since efforts to diversify organizations/companies/government/etc. typically involve reducing the relative proportion of whites and increasing the proportion of non-whites, diversity is anti-white.
"Anti-woke is code for anti-black" is based on the logic that since 'anti-woke' efforts include as a central pillar the elimination of affirmative action (in education, employment, federal contracting and so on), thereby certainly reducing the relative proportion of black people in those organizations, anti-woke is anti-black.
You can take a principled libertarian stance that 'diversity' is manipulating the ratios and 'anti-woke' merely restoring the natural order of things, but from a consequentialist perspective one linearly reduces the proportion of whites in major organizations and one linearly reduces the proportion of blacks. A white person advocating the latter and a black person the former are both displaying ethnic self-interest.
"Diversity" is aimed (often explicitly) at reducing the relative proportion of whites (and sometimes Asians). Elimination of affirmative action is aimed at NOT doing that. These are not the same.
You can’t tell me that anti-affirmative action advocates aren’t firmly aware that they’re in practice advocating for a huge reduction in black representation in top colleges, businesses, civil service employment, state contracts and so on.
Aware - maybe, want - not at all. Reducing the representation is not the policy goal. Stopping artificial racist distortion of the market (and society) is. If the statistics would be different - then it will be, but it's not the goal of the advocacy. Just as the result of reducing child mortality could be raise in crime (because poor children would die more often, and if they stop dying, they have higher chance to grow up into criminals), it does not mean every pediatrician has increasing crime as their goal. Making such inferences is both unproductive and unfair.
2rafa is arguing consequentialism here, that anti-AA advocates are firmly aware of the consequences of their actions. This is indeed the bar because the context is that Diversity is anti-white in consequences.
If pro-AA advocates can play the intent and goal card, then the policy goal of Diversity is to stop artificial racist distortion of the market, which is what results in underperforming minorities.
Are both of these inferences unfair, or only one?
That assumes such a distortion exists, which is very much unproven. While the AA distortion is obvious and easily seen - and, in fact, nobody even attempts to hide it, and if they did, it'd be extremely easy to disprove just quoting their own policies - the other side requires introducing phlogiston-like "systemic racism", which is immeasurable, imperceptible, unfalsifiable and can only be proven by employing the circular argument from the outcome. Admittedly, some racist policies existed, and it is theoretically possible somehow, somewhere the remnants of them survived (e.g., gun control policies or union protections have well known racist roots) - and if they did, getting rid of them would be appropriate. However, that is not what AA proponents are arguing for, and that's not what they are basing their argument on. There's no symmetry - it's like comparing General Relativity and flat-earth hypothesis - on the surface, both look structurally similar, as they both make some claims about certain phenomena, but once you bother looking deeper, the similarity disappears entirely.
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"Diversity" is anti-white in intent, in action, and in consequences. As we routinely have confirmed with advocates of such using phrases like "stale, pale, and male" or "useless white male pilots".
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