Is this reverse racism? Plenty of people online thought so. Is it an outlier? Not really. In recent years we’ve seen how recruitment has been skewed to suit an ideological agenda that puts racial identity above actual ability.
It’s very big business. According to the management consultancy McKinsey, organisations spent $9.5bn in 2023 on what has become known as D.E.I. The acronym stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. But when applied to someone over-promoted as a ‘diversity hire’, it might just as well mean ‘Didn’t Earn It’.
Where did it come from? It started life, like so many strains of the Woke Mind Virus, on US college campuses. But it was given steroids by the corporate reaction to the killing of the American felon, George Floyd. Do you remember the mass hysteria in HR departments which followed? In the States, Coca Cola was said to have urged its thousands of employees to ‘be less white’. But the UK wasn’t immune. At Sky TV, where I was then working, panicked senior white executives issued emails dripping with self-abasement. Within months staff were given ‘inclusive language’ guides and forced to attend ‘unconscious bias’ courses.
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Remember the scandal in 2022 of white pilots missing out on jobs because of RAF diversity targets? Or the story last year about the Royal Navy taking sailors off their main duties and redeploying them as ‘diversity and inclusion officers’, even though our surface fleet is chronically understaffed?
Well, you may have missed it, but the worm has turned. Take a company like Walmart. In the wake of urgings from the (now discredited) Black Lives Matter movement, the company went all-in on D.E.I. Shopfloor employees were told to ditch their ‘white supremacy thinking’, even though many of those working in stores were earning a fraction of what their diversity overlords were pulling in. Now though, with the Trump administration making clear its opposition, Walmart is ditching DEI. Not just Walmart, but blue-chip companies like Boeing, John Deere, McDonalds and Amazon.
And in an extraordinary interview on the Joe Rogan podcast last week Mark Zuckerberg announced his company was ditching DEI programmes. The boss of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, drove home the point by stressing there would no longer be tampons available in any Meta men’s toilets.
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Even in corporate circles the very idea at the core of DEI – that adopting its strictures will help the bottom line – has been debunked. Last year an authoritative study found that increasing the ethnic diversity of executives did not improve profits. And what about those who notionally benefit? Many non-white candidates would rather pass on help getting a job given via DEI. Who wants to be seen as the person in the office there for reasons of tokenism not merit?
Will the UK follow in the wake of the US? We can only hope. But don’t hold your breath. No matter how many billions are trimmed from public sector diversity programs in America by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, it’s hard to think Starmer’s Labour will follow suit.
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Most of all, the recent focus on rape gangs is a counterpoint to where this all took off with the death of George Floyd. His death was weaponised by those who said that to be white was to be incapable of being a victim of racism. An analysis impossible to sustain in light of events in Oldham and elsewhere.
* Original Article:
https://www.gbnews.com/opinion/jobs-awarded-skin-colour-colin-brazier
