The anti-DEI argument is that modern racial disparities are predominantly caused by economic circumstances, e.g. black people are more likely to be poor and then less likely to have to startup capital to start their own business or be able to afford to attend a high status university. The same applies to white people who don't have affluent parents. "White people who grew up poor" are under-represented at the top of society.
So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity, not race. To fix it you need to e.g. make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities. That allows both poor black people and poor white people to get ahead without discriminating against anyone, but still reduces the racial disparity because black people are disproportionately poor.
It's basically Goodhart's law. Because of the existing correlation between race and poverty, continuing racial disparities are a strong proxy for insufficient upward mobility, but you want to solve the actual problem and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.
So the underlying problem here is economic opportunity, not race. To fix it you need to e.g. make it easier for someone without rich parents to start a business by lowering barriers to entry and regulatory overhead on small entities. That allows both poor black people and poor white people to get ahead without discriminating against anyone, but still reduces the racial disparity because black people are disproportionately poor.
It's basically Goodhart's law. Because of the existing correlation between race and poverty, continuing racial disparities are a strong proxy for insufficient upward mobility, but you want to solve the actual problem and not just fudge the metric through race quotas etc.