This was a few weeks ago – I was out to dinner with a few friends of mine from high school. Naturally, the topic of politics came up. It was mere weeks after Trump 2.0 took office, and already, years of progress were being rapidly dismantled.

One of the first casualties was DEI. A single man in power had managed to undo years—decades, really—of goodwill, hard-won policy, and cultural shift. And yet, to my surprise, people weren’t mourning that loss. They were cheering it.

I expected outrage. I expected frustration. What I got was a smug reversion to “meritocracy.”

I. Was. Floored.

It had never occurred to me that I would need to defend DEI—especially not among old friends, people I thought shared my values. But there I was, blindsided at a dinner table, suddenly on the defensive for believing that inclusion matters.

“What about sports?” they countered. I argued football, since that’s what I knew best. The NFL has had a rule on the books about at least interviewing people of color for head coaching positions for a long time now. This was a great example of DEI in action. The results notwithstanding, at the very least there was a step taken.

They argued that they meant athletes. That athletes were all playing because they were the best at that position, and that the quality of the game would suffer if we were to insist that there had to be inclusion, there had to be …say 3 people on every basketball team that was under 6 feet tall because that’s what the society deemed to be inclusive.

I had no words, I could see that being a good point, if sports was a meritocracy, why couldn’t corporate America?

They continued. They had been part of the DEI conversation too, as a hiring manager. They brought up one example that stuck out. One was a Black, woman, coder. She checked all the boxes and was a great diversity hire. Well, to say she wasn’t a good coder, was an understatement. After a year she had been swooped up by another big firm (I forget, but I think it was a FAANG firm), but I was assured had she not, she would’ve been out the door not much later.

I argued that while DEI might not be perfect, the answer shouldn’t be to throw it away, but to work on the solution, improve DEI.

They then countered “What is the answer then”

Well. I was taken aback. I mean if I had all the answers, I think it would behoove me to be in a more prominent position than the one I’m in now. I had to admit I didn’t have one, but that the start of fixing a problem is to realize there is one. And we should try to fix not dismantle what we don’t like.

They then brought an example about Asians now, being grouped in with White workers in the tech sector. Their argument was that now there is fewer spots that can be filled, then southeast Asians are disproportionally rejected. That because of these arbitrary check boxes, we cannot hire the best people, and some people don’t even get the chance because of the scarcity of jobs.

Their final argument was that race, as a concept, does not relate people more than socio-economic factors. Their point was that an ethnically Chinese man in Dallas has more in common with his ethnically Mexican neighbor than he would with a Chinese man in Shanghai. Why then would group all Chinese people together in this check box.

I left that dinner a little shaken, more than I’d like to admit. I knew in my core that I was right, and DEI is a good idea, but I was so taken aback that I couldn’t articulate why their points were invalid. So when I got home, I started to think about this long and hard, and I mentally reviewed their arguments and examined them for what they were.