Diversity washing

DEI

Here is a story about how far we have come in America, from January 2025, also featuring an earlier piece about diversity washing: 

These 12 major companies caved to the far right and stopped DEI programs

“Companies scaling back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs have started a trend.

“Right-wingers have been railing against DEI for a while now, and one of the loudest is Robby Starbuck, a failed filmmaker and failed congressional candidate. He objects to companies sponsoring Pride events, supporting transgender employees, taking action against climate change, and more. Oh, and he thinks toxic chemicals turn people queer and that the COVID-19 vaccine is what killed Matthew Perry.”

Climate change advocates are DEI killjoys?

“But the anti-DEI movement is bigger than just Starbuck. ‘Business experts have told CNN that Starbuck’s activism alone does not fully explain these decisions, and some companies’ commitments to diversity and inclusion were thin to start.” 

“Diversity washing” is the new greenwashing (2023)

“What’s that? According to this paper authored by academics from several institutions, including Chicago Booth and the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford, there are a number of companies that actively promote their commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion in their public communications, but in actuality, their hiring practices, well, don’t quite measure up. 

“The authors label companies with significant discrepancies—companies that discuss diversity more than their actual employee gender and racial diversity warrants—as ‘diversity washers.’ What’s more, the authors found, companies that engaged in diversity washing received better ratings from ESG rating firms and were often financed by ESG-focused funds, even though these companies were ‘more likely to incur discrimination violations and pay larger fines for these actions.'”

Everything is the fault of DEI.

From what I’ve seen in right-wing media, DEI hires caused the fires in Southern California to expand, even as the Los Angeles fire chief has two decades of fire fighting experience.  

 Strangely enough, DEI seems to have nothing to do with all the annual hurricane damage in locations like Texas, Florida, and Speaker Mike Johnson’s Louisiana. That’s why we need “standards.” Before we give money to those blue-state people, they’ll have to fix whatever systems they broke. But those folks on the Gulf of Mexico should receive help immediately.

FOTUS instantly blamed DEI and Biden for the mid-air collision over the Potomac River on January 29, saying that standards for air traffic controllers had been too lax, including the FAA hiring people with “severe intellectual” and “psychiatric” disabilities. However, he cites no evidence because he likes saying stuff.

The clear message is that if the person in charge is black or a woman or gay, and they falter, they must have only gotten the job because of “reverse discrimination.” When you are a competent person, this tension can be exhausting, but this is nothing new. Read the description of the 1969 novel The Spook Who Sat By The Door by  Sam Greenlee

Nasty (and not in a good way)

Kelly hit on something. “They aren’t looking to reverse progressive policy because they disagree with it. They are looking to pass as much harmful policy as possible because they are angry with America for ever having passed it in the first place, and they want to punish Americans for it.”

There are SO many examples. I’ll pick one from MedPage Today about the CDC removing certain pages:

“In addition, tools to estimate and reduce the risk of HIV were also down at the time of writing, as was a page on CDC’s efforts to address racism as a driver of health disparities.”

So, as I understand it, DEI is the problem, even though it wasn’t applied as rigorously as some people seem to think. We should be selecting competent folks like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Hah! Jonathan Chait wrote in the Atlantic [paywall] that FOTUS “is promising a return to meritocracy—while staffing his government with underqualified loyalists.”

I will posit that not being in favor of DEI isn’t inherently racist/sexist/homophobic, though I could make a case for its value. Conversely, blaming everything that goes wrong on DEI is precisely racist, sexist, and homophobic.

DEI is

From a post on Facebook, which I pared down somewhat: What DEI Is :

-ramps and sidewalk curb cuts
-subtitles & captions (TV & phone)
-family restrooms
-pay equity & transparency
-parental leave (time & pay)
-not having to just accept workplace harassment
-work accommodations for a variety of disabilities
-flexible work arrangements
-various food options for vegetarians/vegans/kosher/gluten-free/etc at medical facilities
-non smoking areas/end of smoking indoors
-large print materials
-materials in different languages
Some of What DEI isn’t:
-hiring an underqualified person for a job just because they’re a person of color
-hiring based on race just to meet diversity goals (this is illegal)
 -a  new fad or buzzword. DEI work has been going on for many, many years, under different names

Now that DEI has driven from parts of corporate America and the federal government, inequality has been quashed! Yeah, right.

Vanilla ice cream and watermelon

Except on July Fourth.

Vanilla ice cream and watermelon are often associated with the summer. There’s a piece in Medium – which you may or may not be able to access – titled How The Ice Cream Song Exposes Absurdity of American  Racism: An essay about ice cream, racism, and stereotypes by Allison Wiltz, M.S.

She notes a song, “released in March 1916 by the Columbia Graphophone Company, entitled ‘N—— Love a Watermelon Ha! Ha! Ha!’… written by Harry C. Browne, a White banjo player and actor who regularly performed the song wearing blackface… This portrayal undermined Black Americans’ use of the watermelon as a symbol of resistance during the Reconstruction Era. In the song, Browne referred to watermelon as ‘colored man’s ice cream.’

“The ice cream song began with a shockingly racist line, ‘You n — — quit throwin’ them bones and come down and get your ice cream.’ Originally, ‘Turkey in a Straw’ was a folk song with British and Irish roots, with no racial connotations. Nevertheless, in minstrel shows throughout America, Browne popularized a racist remix.”

Not my preference

This intrigued me because, as my family knows, I do not like watermelon. I never have, which predates my understanding of the fruit’s implication. Over the years, people have asked me if my disdain for the fruit was based on the stereotype. Nope. 

I’m not too fond of cantaloupe either; I’m not a melon guy. When my daughter offered us some gum on a recent car trip, she knew I’d decline when I learned what flavor of gum she had.

When I was in charge of the NY/PA Olin reunion in the 2010s, one job was picking up the watermelon from the grocery store. I always felt ill-equipped to pick out a “good” one by tapping it or whatever scientific method one uses.

However, if they were washed off, I loved propelling watermelon seeds with my tongue and was not bad at it.

Dairy

Wiltz wrote this, something I already knew: “Folklore in the black community suggested that, in some areas, White people were so racist during Jim Crow that they would deprive Black people of vanilla ice cream… In Maya Angelou’s autobiography, ‘I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings,’ she shared such a narrative. ‘People in Stamps [Arkansas] used to say the whites in our town were so prejudiced that a Negro couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth. Other days, he had to be satisfied with chocolate.'”

When I was in sixth grade at Daniel S. Dickinson in Binghamton, NY, we were to get ice cream; I don’t remember the occasion, but I remember the little cups of Sealtest (I think) ice cream with these odd wooden spoons.

I was briefly out of the room when our flavor choices were being determined. When I returned, I was asked for my pick. I said, “Vanilla.” The whole class moaned. They had all picked chocolate.

It would be easy to create some racialization of this: the only black kid in the class picks vanilla. But I knew my classmates, about half of them – 7 of 15 – since kindergarten. They were disappointed that we didn’t achieve unanimity. If I HAD been in the room earlier, I probably would have also picked chocolate. Unlike watermelon, I like chocolate ice cream just fine.

“America is Not a Racist Country”

“It took America a while to get that right.”

Former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley is quoted several times as saying, “America is Not a Racist Country.” I’m inclined to believe that what she says is sincere. So, I read this THR interview with her with great interest.

She notes that she spent much time discussing race relations in a recent interview with Charlemagne. “What I said was, I’m not denying that there is racism in America.” She noted, “We should stomp it out every time we see it, and I did that as governor, and I did it as UN ambassador, and I will do that in everything I ever do.”

Here’s her nuance on the topic. “I said America is not a racist country, and my reasoning for that is I don’t think that America was intended to be a racist country. All men were supposed to be created equal with life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It took America a while to get that right.”

Ah, that’s an interesting take on the Founders. My rhetorical question: And when was the point she believed that the goal was achieved? I’m not trying to be pedantic here.  Was it after the Civil War, maybe with the Civil War amendments? (And BTW, I didn’t care much about her muddled comment about whether slavery was the cause of the Civil War.) Or perhaps a century later? Or 2008?

The discussion is relevant about how we see our nation and what we should address if there are things to fix. Unfortunately, that question was not asked.  But I think we’re dealing with definitional differences.

Try that in a small town.

She noted, “As a brown girl who grew up in a small rural town, if my parents had told me that ‘you were born into a racist country,’ I would’ve always felt like I was disadvantaged. Instead, my parents always said, ‘You may encounter racism, but there’s nothing you can’t do, and you should work twice as hard to prove to everybody that you deserve to be in the room.'” Hmm. That sounded like the message that black kids of my generation always heard. So, she experienced individual racism.

In The Breakfast Club discussion, she stated that the division of the people over race started with Barack Obama because he used executive orders extensively. Since the Tea Party and its ilk arose, the Republicans failed to compromise or work with him. They wanted to make him a one-term president.

My take is more in keeping with what William Spivey suggested, that Obama’s election sparked the “fourth wave of white supremacy.”

“The general election [of 2008] removed any pretense that race was not a factor. Surrogates for John McCain depicted Barack and Michelle as monkeys. Obama faced birtherism charges of being born in Nigeria, Kenya, or maybe both, led by Donald Trump. Racist memes flooded the Internet… One might think things would have calmed down [after he was elected], but there were outbreaks of racism and race-based attacks throughout the country well before Obama took his oath of office.”

I give Nikki Haley props for “removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House following the racially charged murder of nine Black parishioners at Mother Emanuel Church” in 2015, after defending the flag as part of the state’s “heritage” five years earlier. But I find her thoughts on race in America less compelling than I had hoped.

Color blindness as “the best form of antiracism”?

Wendell Phillips

On the first day of Black History Month, the Boston Globe posted a piece entitled “Color blindness remains the best form of antiracism.” It may be behind a paywall.

“Coleman Hughes is an author and podcaster. This essay is adapted from his book ‘The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America,’ to be published on [February 6] Tuesday by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House.”

The subtitle of Hughes’ article was, “Of course we all see race. But it’s a bad basis for determining how to treat people or craft public policy.”

Part of his argument points out an earlier definition of color blindness, which is better enuciated in a TED talk called The Case for color blindness.

He notes that the adverse “reaction to color blindness is actually a fault of its advocates. People will say things like, ‘I don’t see color’ as a way of expressing support for color blindness. But this phrase is guaranteed to produce confusion because you do see color, right? “

An observation here. Small children likely see race and pick up cultural values about it much earlier than we might have believed. This is why I believe discussing race is essential, just at the point that there are forces in the United States that want to ban books dealing with race, gender identity, and the like.

19th-century roots
Hughes is correct when he says we should eliminate the phrase “I don’t see color.” Instead, we should “replace it with what we really mean to say, which is, ‘I try to treat people without regard to race.'”

He makes an interesting historical observation. “The philosophy of color blindness… actually comes from the radical wing of the antislavery movement in the 19th century. The earliest mentions of color blindness come from Wendell Phillips, who was the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and a man whose nickname was ‘abolition’s golden trumpet.’

“He believed in immediate full equality for Black Americans. 

And in 1865, he called for the creation of a ‘government colorblind,’ 
by which he meant the permanent end of all laws that mention race.”

Of course, we know that did not happen. Jim Crow, sunset laws, Plessy v. Ferguson, restrictive housing covenants, etc., etc.  And actions that didn’t have to mention race, such as lynchings.

Sidebar
Speaking of Plessy, I’ve discovered that John Marshall Harlan’s dissent in that case was rather narrow. From this journal article: “The consensus
regarding the then-extant legal understandings of ‘rights’ in post-Civil
War America are on display in Justice Harlan’s opinion.” In other decisions, “Justice Harlan recognized and accepted the legal distinction between civil rights and social rights, a distinction ‘mark[ing] a sphere of associational freedom in which law would allow practices of racial discrimination to flourish.'”

And “in a passage containing his well-known metaphor of a
colorblind Constitution, he stated:
“[I]n view of the Constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this
country no superior, dominant ruling class of citizens. There is no
caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor
tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all
citizens are equal before the law.

“This call for civil-rights colorblindness was immediately preceded by this
passage:
“‘The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country.
And so it is, in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth,
and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it
remains true to its great heritage, and holds fast to the principles of
constitutional liberty.” Thus, the definition of the term color-blind was not universally understood.

I think Hughes’ point that having policies meant to reduce inequality be executed based on class instead of race has merit. But maybe it is more of a “both-and” thing. How do we address the loss of generational wealth resulting from previous discrimination? The risk to pregnant black women’s health when dealing with the medical establishment appears to be irrespective of the prospective mother’s socio-economic status.

Coleman Hughes has added to the discussion. I haven’t fully embraced his POV, but that’s okay.

August rambling: it does matter

Roger Green reviews John Green (no relation)

392 “Educational Intimidation” Bills Have Been Introduced in the US Since 2021

How the Myth of Colorblindness Endangers France’s Future: The refusal to gather data on race and ethnicity is exacerbating inequality, increasing social segregation, and preventing badly needed reforms.

How did Frederick Douglass become a conservative spokesman?

A New Monument to Emmett Till Doesn’t Measure Progress, But It Does Matter?

A raid on a Kansas newspaper likely broke the law, experts say. But which one?

Is Mental Health a Workplace Issue?

Ingenious librarians: A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it

The little search engine that couldn’t. A couple of ex-Googlers set out to create the search engine of the future. They built something faster, simpler, and ad-free. So how come you’ve never heard of Neeva?

India lands a spacecraft near the moon’s south pole, a first for the world as it joins an elite club. WAY cool.

Brain-reading devices allow paralysed people to talk using their thoughts. Two studies report considerable improvements in technologies designed to help people with facial paralysis communicate. But the devices must be tested on many more people to prove their reliability.

Why do upstate New Yorkers call it city chicken when it isn’t even made of chicken?

Now I Know: The Translator That Sucked The Life Out of Dracula and  Ulysses Subtracting (Land) Grant? and You Can’t Eat Here (And Don’t Really Want to Anyway) and The Man Who Lives on Cruise Ships and The Fans Who Saved The Day (For the Bad Guys) and The River Race that Doesn’t Like Water

OBITS

Jerry Moss, A&M Records Co-Founder and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Member, Dies at 88

Clarence Avant, ‘Godfather of Black Music,’ and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Member, Dies at 92

Bob Barker, Famed Game Show Host, Dies at 99

Plus, people I’ve known IRL:

Billie Anderson, 93, a pillar at Trinity AME Zion Church in Binghamton, NY, the church I grew up in, died July 23. Then  her daughter Penny Sanders, a contemporary of mine, passed c. August 17

Dwight Smith, 93, a longtime member of my current church, choir, and Bible study, among other things, died August 7

Marilyn Cannoll, 93, who was the head of the Schenectady Arts Council when I worked there in 1978, died on August 9

John Wolcott, 90, a “rebel with a cause, a purveyor of justice and the truth,” died on August 17

Jacqui Williams, who I knew from Filling in the Gaps in American History, died on August 22. She spoke at my church in 2015; though the website is defunct, the Facebook page has lots of information

Matthew 5 is too “woke”

From Newsweek: Evangelical leader Russell Moore said that he saw Christianity in “crisis” because the teachings of Jesus were being viewed by a growing number of people as “subversive” to their right-wing ideology. The idea of “turning the other cheek” and other teachings of Jesus are being rejected as “liberal talking points.” Theologians described it as a rift within the conservative Christian faith that had come to be defined by support for djt.

It’s a dichotomy between theological evangelicals concerned primarily with Christian character and “political” evangelicals intent on winning the culture war, experts told Newsweek. See also: Daily Kos.

The Georgia indictments

djt has a “plan” for America called Agenda 47, and it’s a helluva thing.

Albany Public Library

Proceeds from the event benefit library programs and services. Purchase tickets here.

Tuesday noon book reviews at Washington Avenue large auditorium: I suppose I should plug September 12 | The Anthropocene Reviewed:  Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green.  Reviewer:  Roger O. Green, MLS, retired librarian, NY Small Business Development Center, & current board member, FFAPL.

Also:

September 5 | Two Photography books:  Uncommon Places by Stephen Shore & Empire by Martin Hyers & William Mebane.  Reviewer:  David Brickman, exhibiting photographer, art critic, & FFAPL treasurer.

September 19 | The Heat Will Kill You First:  Life and Death on a Scorched Planet by Jeff Goodell.  Reviewer:  Richard King, retired attorney.

September 26 | A Conspiracy of Mothers, a novel by Colleen Van Niekerk.  Reviewer:  Miki Conn, author, poet, artist, storyteller.

MUSIC

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door– the PFC Band, in memory of Robbie Robertson

Coverville 1453: The Gamble & Huff Cover Story and 1454: The Robbie Robertson Tribute 

Peter Sprague Plays Coltrane’s Giant Steps

My Home by Antonin Dvorak

Brahms: Academic Festival Overture (Solti, CSO)

Peter Sprague Plays Badge featuring Leonard Patton

The Boy From… – Linda Lavin, written by Esteban Río Nido

Ramblin' with Roger
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