White Men Need Not Apply

I stumbled upon a job posting online, It pays $160,000 a year.

“The Department of Physics and Astronomy at The University of British Columbia (UBC) invite applications for a CIHR Tier 2 Canada Research Chair in Medical Physics.”

It goes on:

“[...in an effort to] sustain the participation of people with disabilities, Indigenous people, racialized people, women, and people from minoritized gender identity groups,… UBC is currently [restricting recruitment ] to members of these groups."

It seems that they’ve finally said the quiet part out loud at UBC. This was (with some paraphrasing) pulled straight from the JD at a premier Canadian public(ly funded) university.

We're evidently at a point where good intentioned ideas have gone too far. This cannot be acceptable. These restrictions are racism and sexism as policy. They explicitly target a distinct group of people based on their immutable characteristics, and says "this is for anyone but you".

I learned at a young age while fighting with my sister in the backseat of the car - two wrongs don't make a right. Similar to my previous article on how it’s wrong to kill people - I thought this was a universally supported basic premise. It's not ok to exclude people because of what they look like or where they come from.

We can and should debate the need and mechanism to get more women or racialized people into STEM (Science, Technology, Math, & Engineering). But to pretend that removing white guys from the playing field, explicitly punishing and excluding them because of the colour of their skin is simply wrong.

Imagine a person who has worked for 30 years to become a tenured prof at the best school in British Columbia, only to be met with a wall because of their gender and ethnicity. Is this not the exact thing that DEI was created to prevent in the first place? Like Harvey Dent says in "The Dark Knight": You either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.

As a trusted advisor of mine puts it: "A lot of people don’t have to imagine it, because the truth is marginalized communities have definitely experienced it. Companies just haven’t been as outright in saying it."

So it is particularly noteworthy that we've progressed (back) to a point where discrimination is so casual, public, and seemingly benign.

If we accept the premise that some groups have had it harder than others in Canadian society (which I do), then there are many positive ways to encourage those marginalized groups to participate in fields in which they are underrepresented. We can fund organizations that help bring education into those spaces. We can pay special attention to low income communities where opportunity is scarce. These are solvable problems, we can solve them by raising people up.

That’s real inclusion. Arming populations with the tools to succeed. Not removing the competition and calling it a victory.

I was outraged upon discovering this clause in the post and yet when I pointed this out to a friend in academia, he was completely non-plussed:

“Sometimes it can be frustrating from my position when I'm ineligible for a position, but I'm not foaming at the mouth because of it. [These kinds of restrictions] are not uncommon."

“Wow.. the defeatism” I thought. The ridiculous acceptance of this kind of policy as just another fact of life.The notion that people have learned to incorporate discrimination against them into their professional landscape is jarring. I’m certainly not foaming at the mouth, but I am highly concerned that these racist and sexist policies have seemingly become a feature of the zeitgeist.

If you are able to ignore the logical deficiency in "I'm against racism except for...", then perhaps another vertical may convince you. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander after all. In other words, consider what happens if we set a precedent that it is ok to put exclusions like this in a job description. We have a paradigm where you can now explicitly discriminate against people based on race or gender, and the government sponsors it. How long is it until the shoe is on the other foot and we find the job description that states (insert your special interest group here) isn't eligible? If it's ok now, why wouldn't it be ok then? You can't only be against racism when it suits you.

Practically speaking, what does “white” or “marginalized” even mean? When do you stop being white and start being “ethnic” or “racialized”? Who gets to decide? If gender is a social construct and a spectrum (a point that is so often argued by strong proponents of DEI), then when do you stop being a man or woman and start being something else? If you stare at it long enough, it doesn't compute, and it becomes comedic.

In a sense, I admire the university for its candor. The prejudice is right there in the job description. But why not eliminate the list of who can apply entirely. It can be replaced with something that rings clear and gets to the heart of the matter:

White men need not apply.