Such sentiments obviously would not be openly voiced in most companies today. The civil rights revolution has seen to that. Still, it seems that every so often we get ugly reminders–of which the Texaco imbroglio is the latest–that Jim Crow’s spirit is not yet dead. In 1994, Denny’s restaurant chain agreed–in a settlement with the Justice Department–to put a civil rights monitor on its payroll and to cough up $45 million in damages, after a slew of complaints alleging discrimination against customers and employees. The previous year Shoney’s, another restaurant chain, settled a suit for over $100 million that alleged, among other things, that managers were told to keep the number of black employees down in certain neighborhoods.
People of color with training and experience are ““treated like s–t in too many places on the job,’’ said assistant labor secretary Bernard Anderson, whose responsibilities include the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. Even within the labor department, said Anderson, he had seen racial prejudice. When a black colleague, a Rhodes scholar, appointed two other blacks with impeccable credentials to positions, ““the black lawyers were very empowered and encouraged by all of this,’’ recalled Anderson, ““but a number of the white lawyers… were just shaking in their boots.’’ By and by, he said, a ““poison pen memorandum’’ found its way around the department. The missive made insulting, scatological comments, questioned the credentials of the people who had been appointed, and declared that affirmative action had gone too far.
Resentment against minorities often surfaces in places where ““diversity’’ or affirmative action programs are in place. And that resentment often breeds resistance that results not merely in nasty comments but in outright sabotage.
Some time ago, the black employees of a large, international corporation invited me to talk about a previous book, The Rage of a Privileged Class, at a corporate-wide event. In talking with my hosts, I quickly discovered that they were not merely interested in my insights. They wanted me to send a message to the management. They were frustrated because a corporate affirmative-action program, of which the management was extremely proud, was not doing them any good. Mid-level managers, it turned out, got diversity points for hiring or promoting minorities, but the corporation had defined minorities in such a way that everyone who was not a U.S.-born white man qualified. In other words, the managers got as much credit for transferring white men from Europe, Australia, and Canada as they did for promoting African Americans. And that is exactly what they were doing, according to the black employees, who wanted me to let the management know, in a nice and subtle way, that such behavior was unacceptable.
I’m not sure what message the management ended up extracting from my speech, but I am sure that the frustrations those black employees felt are widespread–and that the cause lies less in so-called diversity programs than in the widespread tendency to judge minority group members more by color than by ability.
Some two decades ago, I received a brutal lesson in how galling such attitudes can be. At the time, I was a young (maybe twenty-one or twenty-two years old) columnist-reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. Though I had only been in the business a few years, I was acquiring something of a regional reputation.I hoped to break into magazine writing by garnering a few freelance assignments from Esquire magazine, so I had made an appointment with one of its editors.
The editor with whom I met was a pleasant and rather gracious man, but what he had to say was sobering. He wasn’t sure, he confided, how many black readers Esquire had, but was reasonably certain the number was not high. Since I had not inquired about his readership, the statement took me a bit by surprise. I had been a longtime reader of Esquire, and it had never previously occurred to me that I was not supposed to be, that it was not me whom Esquire had in mind as an audience–never mind as a contributor. I don’t know whether the editor bothered to read my clippings, but then, the clips were somehow superfluous; the very fact that I had written them made them so. All the editor saw was a young black guy, and since Esquire was not in need of a young black guy, they were not in need of me. I left that office in a state of controlled fury–not just because the editor had rejected me as a writer, but because he had been so busy focusing on my race that he was incapable of seeing me or my work.
A nominal commitment to diversity does not necessarily guarantee an appreciably better outcome, as I came to see several years ago when I was approached by a newspaper publisher who was in the process of putting together his management team. He was interested, he said, in hiring some minority senior managers, so I gave him some names of people who might be likely candidates. Over the next several months, I watched as he put his team in place–a team, as it turned out, that was totally white. Only after he had largely assembled that group did he begin serious talks with some of the nonwhites I had recommended.
I don’t doubt the man’s sincerity. He did want to hire some minority managers, and eventually did so. But what was clear to me was that to him, minority recruitment apparently meant the recruitment of people who couldn’t be trusted with the organization’s most important jobs. His first priority was hiring people who could do the work–meaning whites–and only after that task was complete would he concern himself with the window dressing of diversity.
Over the years, I have learned that affirmative action in theory and affirmative action in practice are two different things. In the real world it is much more than simply opening up an organization to people who traditionally have been excluded; it is attempting, usually through some contrived measures, to make organizations do what they don’t do naturally–and it goes down about as easily as castor oil. Shortly after I announced my resignation as editor of the editorial pages of the New York Daily News, I took one of my white staff members out to lunch. He told me he had enjoyed working with me and was sorry to see me go. He had cringed when he heard that I was coming, he confided, for he had feared that I would be just another affirmative action executive, presumably incapable of doing the job competently. He admitted that he had been pleasantly surprised.
I was pleased but also saddened by his confession–pleased that he felt comfortable enough to tell me how he truly felt and saddened that the very fact that a person of color got a high-ranking job would lead him (as it had led so many before him) to question that person’s credentials. Yet, having occasionally been the target of affirmative-action recruiters, I am fully aware that (whatever they may say in public) they don’t always pay as much attention to credentials as to color. Therefore, I understand clearly why even the ostensible beneficiaries of such recruitment tactics may find affirmative action, as practiced by major corporations, distasteful and even offensive. A decade and a half ago, for instance, I received a call from an associate of an executive search firm who, after verbally tap dancing for several minutes, essentially asked whether I wished to be considered for a job as a corporate director of equal opportunity. I was stunned, for the question made no sense. I was an expert neither on personnel nor on equal-employment law; I was, however, black, which seemed to be the most important qualification. I laughed and told him that I saw my career going in another direction. Still, I wondered just how serious the inquiry could be, since I seemed (to me, at least) so unsuited for the position. Since then, I have received other calls pushing jobs that have seemed every bit as outlandish.
At one point, a man called to discuss the presidency of a major foundation. I confessed I didn’t understand why he was calling me, and he assured me that the client was extremely interested in having me apply. The man’s earnestness intrigued me enough that I sent him a resume. I never heard from him again, which confirmed, in my mind at any rate, that his interest was anything but genuine. I imagined him sitting in his office with a long list of minority candidates, from whom he would collect resumes and promptly bury them in a file, merely so that his clients would be able to say they had considered minorities. Indeed, when the foundation head was finally named (he was a white man with a long professional association with the foundation trustees), it was clear to me that the supposed search had been a sham. After one takes a few such calls, one realizes that the purpose is often defensibility (““Yes, we took a hard look at fifteen minority candidates, but none quite fit the bill’’) and that the supposed high-level position is merely bait to attract the interest of people who don’t really have a shot–but in whom everyone must pretend they are interested because an affirmative-action program is in place.
It’s logical to argue for the replacement of such shameful practices with something better–for some form of meritocracy. Yet affirmative-action critics who extol the virtues of a meritocracy generally ignore the reality of how a real-world so-called meritocracy works. If qualified, capable, and talented minorities and women exist, they say, corporations will reward them because they will recognize that it is within their economic interest to do so. That may well be true. But it is also true that effective executives are trained, not born. They come about because companies make an investment in them, in their so-called human capital, and nurture their careers along–and if corporations only see the potential in white men, those are the people in whom the investments are likely to be made.
John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor and author of The General Managers, discovered that effective executives generally benefited from what he called the ““success syndrome.’’ They were constantly provided with opportunities for growth: ““They never stagnated for significant periods of time in jobs where there were few growth possibilities.’’ The executives also, to be blunt about it, are often people of relatively modest intellectual endowment. They succeed largely because they are chosen for success.
A true meritocracy would do a much better job of evaluating and choosing a broader variety of people. It would challenge the very way merit is generally imputed and, in giving people ample opportunity to develop and to prove themselves, it would create a truly level playing field.
Simply eliminating affirmative action would not bring such a true meritocracy about. Indeed, a large part of the reason affirmative action is so appealing to so many people is that a meritocracy that fully embraces people of color seems out of reach; and affirmative action is at least one method to get people to accept the fact that talent comes in more than one color.
Yet, by its very nature, affirmative action is polarizing. Wouldn’t it be better, argue a growing number of Americans, to let it die in peace? A chorus of conservative critics even invoke the dream of Martin Luther King Jr. to make the case.
King would probably be more astonished than anyone to hear that conservatives now claim him as one of their own, that they have embraced his dream of a color-blind world and invoke it as proof of the immorality and undesirability of gender and racial preferences. But even if he had a bit of trouble accepting his status as a general in the war against affirmative action, he would appreciate the joke. And he would realize that it is the fate of the dead to be reborn as angels to the living. King no doubt would be pleased to have new friends in his fight for justice, but he would approach them with caution. After sharing his disappointment over past alliances with people whose commitment to change did not match his own, King would address his new associates bluntly. ““All right,’’ he might say, ““I understand why you oppose affirmative action. But tell me: What is your plan? What is your plan to cast the slums of our cities on the junk heaps of history? What is your program to transform the dark yesterdays of segregated education into the bright tomorrows of high-quality, integrated education? What is your strategy to smash separatism, to destroy discrimination, to make justice roll down like water and righteousness flow like a mighty stream from every city hall and statehouse in this great and blessed nation?’’ He might then pause for a reply, his countenance making it unmistakably clear that he would accept neither silence nor sweet nothings as an answer.
