Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban made headlines early this month when he sought to school X chief Elon Musk on the wonders of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) policies and insisted that it is not really race-based hiring. But the video of the woman he put in place to guide his DEI policies shows she did, indeed, use DEI policies to hire strictly based on race and gender to the exclusion of white males.
Cuban engaged with Musk in a series of X posts on Jan. 4, where he defended DEI hiring policies and said there is “zero” evidence that hiring under DEI guidelines can result in “less qualified candidates.” He insisted that DEI opens up the hiring pool for more candidates who are just as qualified as whites. He also said that he still hires based on who is most qualified, DEI policies or not.
Elon Musk disagreed. He insisted that “DEI is just another word for racism.”
DEI is just another word for racism. Shame on anyone who uses it. https://t.co/HM94ZZmfhU
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 3, 2024
Musk also blasted Cuban for his claims that DEI is the best way to help a company succeed.
Mark Cuban is desperately trying to signal his “virtue”, but his hypocrisy convinces no one
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 4, 2024
But Cuban was undaunted. He also said that companies need to hire to “reflect the entire country” because “that’s what puts his company in the best position to succeed.”
Of course, there is an inherent disconnect between hiring with the goal of finding the best, most qualified candidate and the idea of hiring to fill racial quotas that DEI policies mandate. You can’t be hiring “the best” if your only real goal is to hire “the most diverse.” The end goals are completely different.
But now, video has resurfaced of Dallas Mavericks CEO Cynt Marshall, who Cuban hired to be the first black woman to lead an NBA team, which shows that she absolutely understands DEI to mean you hire people based on their race.
Marshall also admitted to eliminating white people and replacing them with “women” and “people of color” simply to achieve “diversity.”
In the resurfaced video from October 2020, the Mavericks CEO was speaking to NPR’s How I Built This with host Guy Raz when she openly admitted that she reshuffled her board for “diversity.”
Mark Cuban is lying. The CEO that he hired explicitly admits to firing/hiring Dallas Maverick’s employees based on their race and gender.
— Mythinformed (@MythinformedMKE) January 29, 2024
This was part of their very transparent 100 day DEI initiative that included daily mandatory bias trainings for their employees.
The NBA… pic.twitter.com/rSjmhRuA30
“I know the business case for diversity,” Marshall told NPR host Raz. “And you have to have a diverse group of people around the table if you really want to be as successful as you can be. And so we took that on, so we laid out that vision, laid out a set of values, and then I had a one-on-one with all the employees and then made some leadership changes.”
She proudly said, “So, now we have almost 50 percent women in leadership and 47 percent people of color. Diversity matters. It matters.”
Here, Marshall is clearly admitting that she removed people who did not meet her standard of diversity and replaced them with people of color and women merely for the sake of “diversity.”
This is in direct refutation of Cuban’s claim that DEI hiring policies are not really race-based and exclusionary.
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