Stacking the Deck Against Affirmative Action

Posted on May 26, 2003 in Class

Tolerance.org has it right regarding what it calls the “The Blair Witch-Hunt Project”:

The top guys at the Times still don’t seem to understand that they have failed on two different fronts: first, by not attracting more qualified non-white journalists to diversify the Times’ newsroom and, second, by giving a young reporter with a dreadful track record bigger and bigger stories supposedly as a way of helping black journalists….[The New York Times] still does not get it. [Times decision-makers] seem not to understand that diversity in the workplace does not mean showing black people who are bad at their jobs greater leniency than whites would get. Diversity programs at their best provide greater access to institutions and workplaces that have a history of excluding qualified minorities. And by that measure, the New York Times newsroom definitely needs to be diversified.

This matches what I often saw in minority hiring. African Americans who I would have been proud to work with — because they were intelligent, thoughtful, charismatic, and real leaders — were scorned by white managers. To prove that they weren’t “racist”, these same managers would hire black people with horrible track records. They would, naturally, do poorly at the job: the white managers would shake their heads and say “See. Affirmative action makes us hire incompetents.

I remember one incident: they goofed and hired a young black man who, though undereducated, showed real initiative out in the warehouse. He and I went through a couple of inventories together and we saw many of the same problems, namely that the warehouse was in chaos. Before our third inventory, he and I, separately, worked out the bugs in our ends of the inventory: I repaired a buggy computer program and Michael organized the warehouse so the same parts went in the same area of the warehouse, cutting down on the number of inventory tickets. White management said that it couldn’t be done and Michael did it: I never doubted him because I had seen it done elsewhere. The inventory took us less than six hours to complete instead of the usual three days. I hand it to Michael Childs that it happened so quickly.

Despite Michael’s achievement, the Executive Vice President tore into his work and accused him of messing things up.

You can guess what happened: someone else grabbed Michael. I couldn’t keep track of him, but it would not surprise me if he has done well these last eleven years. Michael had character.

Managers loved to remember their failures and those African Americans who failed to change the situation for the better — not just for them but for the entire workforce. The example of Michael Childs came back to me tonight as I read the article at Tolerance.org. I remember, too, the incompetents — the people who didn’t understand the requirements of the job and who could not take constructive criticism. White, black, or Latino (no Asians ever worked for us that I saw), they made life hell at that company.

Blair sounds like one of the “tokens” who I saw hired over the years, the “proofs” that Affirmative Action — or indeed any program which strives for diversity in heritage and point of view — is doomed. It was a stacked deck, however. The Bell Curve couldn’t be allowed to have a kink in it. That’s why bad African Americans got the jobs — albeit for a short time — and the smart, committed ones were ostracized and forced to move on.

It’s time to give the committed and the thoughtful a chance in this country.