Race Still Matters to California Companies
Race Still Matters to California Companies
Heather Mac Donald
Wall Street Journal, November 11, 1996
When voters passed the California Civil Rights Initiative, which bans racial and gender preferences in state and local government, they sent a clear message: Let's get back on track toward a color-blind society. It's a message most corporations haven't yet heard. "Proposition 209 will not affect our commitment to affirmative action in any way," says Charles Manor, a spokesman for Lockheed-Martin. Mr. Manor expresses a virtually universal sentiment among large California businesses, which employ a bevy of "diversity" executives and consultants. Despite growing public disgust with quotas, most of the state's major private employers have no intention of moving away from group-conscious policies.
Indeed, during the campaign, Big Business could barely contain its disdain for the initiative. Pro-CCRI strategist Arnie Steinberg recalls his struggles with the business community: "We were constantly running just to stand still. The best we could do was to keep them neutral." Only a, concerted lobbying effort by Gov. Pete Wilson prevented a stampede of corporations from joining Pacific Gas & Electric, which went public with its opposition to the measure.
A coalition of Northern California companies polled voters about their views of affirmative action, and found that a majority wanted to end it-in the private sector as well as the public. Presumably so embarrassed were the sponsors that ultimately only two-Hewlett-Packard and Kaiser Permanente, the giant Oakland based health maintenance organization- were willing to acknowledge having supported the survey.
Meanwhile, the CEOs of such firms as Chevron, Hughes Aircraft and Atlantic Richfield issued ringing endorsements of affirmative action, clearly targeted at the CCRI debate. And many big companies, including Pacific Bell and Southern California Edison, conducted internal "education" campaigns explaining the need for diversity policies. Kaiser Permanente sent a letter to all its member physicians and employees warning of the initiative's dangers.
Now that CCRI has passed, corporate explanations for its success range from voter ignorance to xenophobia. "A lot of fear was played on regarding the diversity of the California population," claims Deborah Yarborough, a diversity initiatives manager at Silicon Graphics. Corporate opponents of the initiative, which is based on the language of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, never acknowledge the possibility that voters approved it out of a simple belief in equality.
In light of the alleged petty-mindedness behind CCRI's approval, many corporations now view their own affirmative action efforts as all the more crucial. "Corporate diversity initiatives are enlightened resources to communities regarding the realities of the population," Ms. Yarborough asserts.
Thus California corporations will continue to hire and promote based on race and sex. San Francisco-based LeviStrauss, for example, hires employees based on their ability to fill a specific demographic gap in its work force. The company's drive for proportional representation has one exception: Only 13% of Levi-Strauss's employees are white males, but the company has yet to undertake a campaign to redress this demographic imbalance.
Hughes Aircraft and Lockheed-Martin, among many others, pay their managers based in part on their record of promoting record of promoting minorities and- women. Corporations minorities and- women. Corporations universally claim a business rationale for such policies. But while it's plausible to suppose, for example, that Hispanics tend to know best how to market to Hispanic consumers, the diversity mandate often leads to a preposterous essentialism. When asked how the racial composition of an engineering team could affect the team's performance, Dave Barclay, Hughes's vice president for diversity, explains that a racially diverse team would bring "diverse approaches to problem solving." Do the laws of physics discriminate?
The diversity ideology consists of an odd blend of power politics and therapeutic aspirations: We have to unseat white males from their alleged positions of power, the argument goes, but also make them empathize with "oppressed" groups. "It is important that white males in the power structure understand the problems we [women and members of ethnic minorities] are faced with," says Mr. Barclay.
"Understanding the other" was once a question for philosophers and psychologists; the diversity-training industry has imported it into the workplace, replete with pop-psychological trappings. "Diversity training draws people out to share those experiences that heighten sensitivity," says Laurie MacDonald, a spokeswoman for Nestle Foods USA. At Nestle's mandated diversity sessions, employees divide into four groups, representing the body and the three parts of the "triune brain," in order to experience how "stereotypes are hidden deep within the primitive part of ourselves," explains Maria Reifler, Nestle's diversity consultant. (Ms. Reifler has brought her theories of the triune brain and "buried prejudices" to Walt Disney, Chrysler and Chevron as well.) Kaiser Permanente is redoubling its diversity efforts in light of CCRI. The company will initiate "comprehensive" diversity training around the theme of "culturally sensitive health care" early next year, says its vice president for diversity, Ron Knox.
Corporate diversity trainers have no patience with quaint notions of equality. "Most people operate with the mind-set: 'I don't pay attention to differences,' scoffs Kathleen Terry, a California diversity consultant who works with Hughes Aircraft, Mattel, Mitsubishi and Northrop. Ms.' Terry fights that "mind-set" by instilling a weird solipsism. "You have to look at the self first," she maintains. "Before I can teach you to become aware of others' differences, you have to get in touch with how those factors have affected your own life." It is difficult to understand how encouraging such self-absorption could improve business competitiveness.
The irony of the diversity effort is that it is superfluous. Precisely because the' population is becoming more ethnically diverse-the mantra of the diversity industry-businesses that practice race-neutral hiring are bound to have a diverse work force. Cypress Semiconductors, a Silicon Valley manufacturer, is a rarity: It has never considered instituting affirmative action. CEO T.J. Rodgers says that if he discriminated against immigrants and minorities, he'd lose 30% to 40% of his company's talent. With the passage of CCRI, Californians can expect to be treated as equals, regardless of race or sex-but only by the government. Those who work for big companies will continue to be regarded as representatives of groups, bearing either a responsibility or a claim for reparation. Corporate America lags far behind the public's commitment to equal opportunity.
Carl
Gutierrez-Jones
Department of English
University of California Santa Barbara, CA 93106
E-mail: carlgj@humanitas.ucsb.edu