Michael Seifert
Mark Cuban is learning the hard way that DEI isn’t so popular.
The Dallas Mavericks owner and dot-com billionaire has been battling legions of haters on X for the past few weeks. While it’s been entertaining to watch, it’s unfortunate that one of the world’s most successful entrepreneurs is so committed to such a destructive ideology.
Cuban has been put in the tough position of defending equity hiring tactics as an NBA team owner and entrepreneur.
Any casual viewer of the NBA can tell you that the teams aren’t diverse—it’s a majority black league. That doesn’t mean the NBA is racist, it just means they are hiring the most qualified players without consideration of race, as it should be.
But that’s not what “diversity, equity, and inclusion” policies look like in practice. Proponents of DEI think employers should factor race heavily into hiring decisions. Elon Musk put it best when he asked Cuban, “so when should we expect to see a short white/Asian women on the Mavs?”
Cuban isn’t convincing anyone that DEI works, instead he’s walked himself into admitting to potentially illegal hiring practices.
Cuban tweeted that "race and gender" can be part of the equation when he chooses who to hire but Andrea Lucas, a commissioner on the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, responded to Cuban and said he was "dead wrong."
"@mcuban, EEOC Commissioner here. Unfortunately, you’re dead wrong on black-letter Title VII law. As a general rule, race/sex can’t even be a ‘motivating factor’ – nor a plus factor, tie-breaker, or tipping point," Lucas wrote. "It’s important employers understand the ground rules here."
Cuban is walking himself into more than just legal trouble. Cuban has also revealed himself to be personally racist. The Dallas Mavericks owner wrote: “You are a CEO of a successful company that has 30 employees that are all black women, and you think a different perspective will help you grow the firm. So, you decide you want to hire a white man? You would be against that right?”
Cuban insinuates here that 30 different black women all have the same perspective, purely because of their skin color. Imagine not only thinking that, but saying it out loud. No two people have the same perspective and someone’s skin color doesn’t determine how they think or view the world.
Cuban is not only fighting off anonymous accounts or conservative icons, but also notable hedge fund giant Bill Ackman.
Ackman wrote, “DEI is not about diversity, equity or inclusion. Trust me. I fell for the same trap you did.”
The world is waking up. Racism to solve perceived racism is just racism.
A common, and true refrain is that “Twitter isn’t real life” but in “real life,” DEI is not beloved.
Just look at the polling on affirmative action, one of the original and most common manifestations of DEI. A 2023 Pew poll showed that just one-third of Americans approved of universities "taking race and ethnicity into account in admissions decisions in order to increase the racial and ethnic diversity at the school."
As children, it was cemented in our brains not to judge people based on their skin color, but on the content of their character. The DEI movement is failing because it promotes policies that are antithetical to this classic American principle. Decent people don’t want to elevate or diminish each other based on the color of their skin, and decent people are repulsed when they hear anyone advocate for such a practice.
Kindergarteners understand that basic truth - it’s time that our business leaders do the same.