Do people think that the quote, "...it is very hard to even interview people who are 'white'..." is about the difficulty this person finds in sitting in a room across from a white person, chatting with him? I understood it to be a perception on this person's part that the efforts to increase diversity have created a condition where such a significant portion of their new hires need to be non-white or non-white-male that it's difficult to get on the interview schedule if you are. And my speculation is that this was an expression due to personal experience - perhaps this person tried to refer a friend and felt he was getting nowhere.
THEY ARE BULLET POINTS PEOPLE...
Going out on a limb, I'd say just about everyone here has seen a PowerPoint presentation with a slide full of what the presenter intends to be attention catching points that beg the question 'what's that about? do tell."
I'm going to play devil's advocate here with some plausible explanations. I don't know the author and wasn't there so this is purely speculative, but I love speculation, it's why my favorite sport is spelunking. I tried to do this with an imagined 'voice' of the presenter but it ended up being mixed with my own - whatever.
- "This is not work for white folks to lead"
--- We're all familiar with congressional committees composed of a group of old white men discussing the legal policy issues related to healthcare access for women. It's a sorry sight. Let's put it up there front and center, that has not and will not constitute and acceptable effort, so it can't happen in this case. Does this mean that white people can't be a party to diversity efforts? no. but really, what's a bigger risk/likelihood, no white people/men on a committee or all white people/men on a committee? yeah.
- "This is not about socio-economic class, mostly."
--- I'm guessing this has something to do with the culture of distorted libertarian ideals held by many in the tech space, and how easy it is to discount racial bias and claim racial indifference while laying the blame for lack of diversity on childhood access to tech and the statistical differences in access based on purely socio-economic demographics. So this is a point to avoid the argument that diversity isn't a tech problem, and that if society fixed schools and whatnot, tech would naturally become more diverse.
- "Why we refer our friends and family (or don't) are where a lot of the answers can be found."
--- If you're a white employee and all your friends are white and you work for a company that is highly dependent on employee network referrals for hiring, you're going to just get more white people. --- "Even my conditioning has been conditioned" ... https://a.tumblr.com/tumblr_lm1glnnHKg1qbce9oo1.mp3 American (global) society is centuries deep in conditioning to value white people more highly than others, irrespective of the opinion-holder's racial identity.
- "33% is barely enough to change the culture."
--- I don't exactly know, but I would suspect that 33% is some arbitrary base target for a diverse workforce created by a group of advisers who were indicative of the reason for the 1st bullet point.
- "we need solidarity with our Asian friends and colleagues"
--- Asians are a minority. Asians have a singularly unique experience in tech-employment (although that's probably specific to Asian males). Let's not get bogged down in intra-minority finger-pointing. I suspect there are plenty of tech companies that point to their Asian-identifying employees when confronted (at least internally) with diversity questions, which probably doesn't satisfy non-Asian minorities.
- "Some of the biggest barriers to progress are white women"
--- There is a perception that historically, some successful women who have had to fight hard for their positions and put up with a great deal of crap from men along the way, have a tendency to reinforce the traditional barriers for subsequent aspiring female colleagues rather than aid in the dismantling of those barriers, due to a sense of personal fairness - sort of "I had it hard, why should you get to cruise in my wake?" or in defense of a space they perceive as arbitrarily limited by men - the thought potentially being "These men were cajoled into making room for one token female law partner at the firm so a rising female colleague is direct competition for my job." Highlight PERCEPTION and SOME please! If this is an actual, documented thing (I don't know?), I'd speculate that it's universal, and not specific to females or white females, but rather to the culture of numbers - meaning white men would do it too if put in the same position. So let's call it out in this presentation - We don't want that, we want understanding, supportive trailblazers, and those trailblazers in tech at this time are white women.
As for the business side, wow what a more rational conversation RE: growth, size, and manageable company cultures.