Discrimination is entrenched in US corporates, just not the kind you might think

Kurt Mahlburg

October 03, 2023 0 Reaction

While the woke have welcomed the news, there are plenty of dissenting voices.

“It’s very hard to imagine this could be legally defensible,” executive director of the American Civil Rights Project Dan Morenoff told the Washington Free Beacon.

Morenoff, who litigates reverse discrimination cases, explained that intention does not have to be proven for the charge of discrimination to stick in court.

“The Justice Department used this theory last year when it sued Meta, Facebook’s parent company, on the grounds that the platform’s algorithms affect users differently based on their race,” the Beacon notes.

Corporate race discrimination has become a particular flashpoint in the culture wars since the Supreme Court banned affirmative action in college admissions in June.

In the fallout of that decision, even companies and law firms are facing lawsuits over their diversity programs, according to the Beacon, which names Starbucks, Facebook, and Verizon as some of the top corporations that “tie executive compensation to racial targets”.

In blunter tones, conservative news website Outkick has labelled the results of Bloomberg’s analysis “excused racism, the presumption that society must discriminate against certain white people to reach racial impartiality”.

“Your whiteness disqualifies you from job openings and promotions. It’s called equity,” quips Outkick. “Corporations discriminate against white people for clout. They are incentivized financially to do so.”

It is hard to disagree. Indeed, Mercator has frequently called out the corporate world’s addiction to ESG — or environmental, social, and corporate governance.

The second letter in that acronym refers to a company’s commitment to diversity and inclusion: in short, prioritising skin color over competence in hiring practices. As Outkick notes, “Executives receive bonuses based on ‘diversity hirings.’ There are year-end quotas to meet.”

This is not just happening at a boardroom level. There is now a litany of powerful ESG “referees” that assign scores to companies, making those companies more or less attractive to investors — especially behemoth investor outfits like BlackRock and Vanguard. A poor enough ESG score spells certainty a company will have no friends on the playground.

Civil Rights Act or no, discrimination — now of the anti-White variety — is well entrenched in the corporate world, both in the U.S. and beyond.

White Americans make up 76 percent of the population. But in 2021, they were hired for just 6 percent of new appointments in the nation’s most powerful companies.

Maybe the woke are right: those hiring decisions balanced the ledger, helping repair an imbalance that for too long saw minorities underrepresented at big US companies.

However, questions of competency aside, the result was still unfair discrimination towards countless well-qualified candidates on no other basis than the colour of their skin.

An abstract goal like “diversity” has been achieved, with workplaces now teeming with diversity avatars — but at what cost for so many defrauded individuals?

It calls to mind the sensible words of C.S. Lewis: “It is easier to be enthusiastic about Humanity with a capital ‘H’ than it is to love individual men and women… Loving everybody in general may be an excuse for loving nobody in particular.” 

Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate architect, a primary school teacher, a missionary, and a young adult pastor.

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