About this: "that my response to attempts to bully and gaslight me into accepting 2022 is somehow worse for all of my black fellow citizens than 1980 or 1950 or maybe even 1920."
How does someone say that with a straight face, let alone insist that others accept it. I started grade school at the dawn of desegregation in Alabama looking not quite like either of the two dominant racial groups. There were classmates who parents saw "colored only" this and that up close. For someone to claim their life today is more difficult is not just a blatant lie, it's insulting those who lived through the sorry chapters of the past.
This is baked-in flaw of activism: the inability to accept any measure of progress, no matter the issue. Perhaps that's by design. Too often, it seems activism is designed to perpetuate problems, or the appearance of problems, because the activist is personally invested in that. People make a living or draw political power from grievance; no one actively seeks to undermine his/her livelihood. Staying in the past means being free to ignore the present. It applies to women, gays, and other groups as easily as to those involved in racial politics.
For the sake of comparison, the 25 million at Berkeley is less than one percent of that institution's total budget, but it's still 25 million dollars. To do what exactly? THAT is the great unknown. You get a lot of qualitative statements on the relative value or lack thereof with this spending, but not much in terms of quantitative effects.
About this: "that my response to attempts to bully and gaslight me into accepting 2022 is somehow worse for all of my black fellow citizens than 1980 or 1950 or maybe even 1920."
How does someone say that with a straight face, let alone insist that others accept it. I started grade school at the dawn of desegregation in Alabama looking not quite like either of the two dominant racial groups. There were classmates who parents saw "colored only" this and that up close. For someone to claim their life today is more difficult is not just a blatant lie, it's insulting those who lived through the sorry chapters of the past.
This is baked-in flaw of activism: the inability to accept any measure of progress, no matter the issue. Perhaps that's by design. Too often, it seems activism is designed to perpetuate problems, or the appearance of problems, because the activist is personally invested in that. People make a living or draw political power from grievance; no one actively seeks to undermine his/her livelihood. Staying in the past means being free to ignore the present. It applies to women, gays, and other groups as easily as to those involved in racial politics.
Are there data reflecting what percentage of various universities' budgets are spent on DEI administrators and their staffs?
This is a tough one and here are three examples of attempts to figure it out. At UC Berkeley, it is an enterprise that employs about 400 people: https://www.thecentersquare.com/california/uc-berkeley-spends-25m-a-year-pays-400-employees-to-advance-equity-and-inclusion/article_65d5a4ec-9894-11eb-b349-4324d0736e41.html
This is an attempt at more far-reaching data, including an attempt to figure out where the money goes: https://cspicenter.org/blog/cspi/the-black-hole-of-dei-spending-at-public-universities/
And there is this, which reads more like an advocacy piece than actual scholarship: https://www.insightintodiversity.com/an-insight-investigation-accounting-for-just-0-5-of-higher-educations-budgets-even-minimal-diversity-funding-supports-their-bottom-line/#:~:text=DEI%20spending%20often%20accounts%20for,four%2Dyear%20public%20institutions%2C%20according
For the sake of comparison, the 25 million at Berkeley is less than one percent of that institution's total budget, but it's still 25 million dollars. To do what exactly? THAT is the great unknown. You get a lot of qualitative statements on the relative value or lack thereof with this spending, but not much in terms of quantitative effects.