Discriminatory Diversity Programs
An innocent program turned into a monster.
Let’s flash back to the year 2000.
In 1987, the Hudson Institute’s Workforce 2000 Report predicted that the American population was going to be older, more female, and diverse. As a result, organizations that prepared for these demographic changes would have an advantage over those that didn’t.
Major employers began to scramble to go beyond the usual equal opportunity (and even affirmative action) programs and focus on how they would be able to recruit, manage and appeal to a more diverse workforce and customer base.
In and of itself, that was not a big deal. At that point, diversity management largely meant training people to communicate more effectively with co-workers and customers.
Over time, however, the balance changed. The tail began to wag the dog. Diversity programs soon outweighed their equal opportunity siblings. With that boost, there was an eventual and quiet shift away from the centrist commitment to equal opportunity and toward an assortment of preferences and anti-racism.
It’s difficult to think of a more divisive way of addressing sensitive personnel issues, but many power bases in America had been infected with the idea that discrimination on behalf of some racial and ethnic groups was not only permissible, but commendable. A common message on campuses was that discrimination against whites, and particularly white males, was necessary to eliminate imbalances.
These beliefs, which would never have been accepted by the nation which embraced the “no one should be subjected to racial discrimination” message of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, amazingly caught hold. It was as if there was national amnesia. They were soon joined by programs that were less focused on behavior – a clear and measurable standard – than on the far more intangible and elusive issue of feelings.
Having administered anti-discrimination programs, I can attest that while the vast majority of people will support efforts to prevent discriminatory behavior, they will be far more reluctant to sign on to ones aimed at changing thoughts.
It is likely that many employees walked out of sensitivity sessions thinking, “My thoughts are none of their damned business. They should only worry about how I behave.”
And yet, oddly enough, top executives, department heads, and corporate counsels signed off on such programs. Many of them may have been driven by white guilt, but cowardice also played a role.
Allegations of racism were commonly acknowledged to be a reputation-killer in many organizations. There were frequent stories of how one indiscreet, stupid, and/or bigoted remark could result in the ignominious end of someone’s career.
As a result, it wasn’t only the louts who clammed up. Those whose decisions went against the diversity marching orders risked having to explain themselves. Explaining is an activity for the defensive and being defensive doesn’t enhance job security and produce promotions. When sensitive scenarios arose, candor and logic were often squelched by expedience.
Hiring and disciplinary decisions are inherently complicated. They become even more so when fear of litigation and bad publicity are tossed into the mix. It was easy to go beyond a business equivalent of the old baseball rule of “tie goes to the runner” and declare a tie even when one didn’t exist in order to award a preference. Where was the greater risk: accommodating a “diversity” outreach program or defending a hiring decision that would trigger the disfavor of HR and the diversity officer and possibly produce a lawsuit?
Lurking in the background was the fear of what would happen if the story made the news. The media rule often resembled that of the Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “Sentence first – verdict afterwards.” There was a real incentive in avoiding the stories about hiring and promotions.
As a result, capitulation could easily become the default mode. The high-publicity cases in which Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton were conveniently employed as “consultants” hit the newspapers, but most of the action, of course, took place in quiet settings where decisions were made that no one, outside of a small circle, would ever hear about.
In those cases, premature surrender might be passed off as hard-nosed decision-making, but it was also easy to pretend that it was noble. “We are foiling discrimination” was the rationale for many decision-makers who were actually committing discrimination.
[Paying off community activist groups is a charade that continues to this day as large corporations write sizable checks and get civil rights awards.]
Of course, the oh-so-clever people in the executive suites did not pay any price in terms of careers or reputations. That invoice landed on the desks of the middle managers and supervisors whose non-discriminatory decisions were undercut by the collaborators at the top.
There also is a larger issue to consider. Unlike discrimination cases which require specific allegations, evidence, and findings, the issue of what people are thinking is elusive, unprovable, and never-ending.
Equal opportunity or even affirmative action were designed with a measurable victory in mind. Not so with the diversity management programs. They were designed to produce permanent jobs for generations of thought police. Their unspoken goal was perpetual reparations.
If Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs had not been gutted by the Trump White House, it is reasonable to believe that they would have been spewing their divisive and discriminatory theories 20, 30, or even 50 years from now.
Their abolition is a major achievement for the nation as a whole, but the weak leadership that collaborated with the zealots behind those programs has yet to be addressed.
That’s why, aside from litigation for civil rights violations, federal contractors and recipients of federal funding should be monitored for their equal opportunity efforts; ones that don’t use preferences and which emphasize nondiscrimination. If that monitoring is not done, many employers will change labels while keeping the old snake oil. University admission offices could teach businesses about the best tactics. Call it Evasion 101.
We are emerging from an Orwellian time in which the most persistent and predictable discrimination was practiced by those whose job was to eliminate that evil. We need to return to first principles, and a key one is the practice of non-discrimination that was established by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
Doing so is an advance, not a retreat.