The Perversity of Diversity

As I have mentioned before, I was born in 1952 and my entire career existed in the era of affirmative action.

After getting a verbal offer on my first real job, I was told that they would be hiring a less qualified candidate – because she was a woman and they didn’t have enough women working at the company.

I can state unequivocally, that at that moment, I had never discriminated against any women in the workplace, I never owned a slave, and by the way, neither did my father, his father, or any of my ancestors – they were all poor fishermen in Canada who became LEGAL IMMIGRANTS in 1922.

Yet I paid the price for years of discrimination against minorities in the United States.

On March 6th, 1961 President Kennedy signed executive order 10925 funding the Employment Equal Rights Committee which became the EEOC, which is the federal bureaucracy that messes with peoples careers based solely on the color of their skin or their sex.

And that was supposed to make me embrace diversity.

To me, that’s the absurdity of the whole diversity program.

We all agree that long ago, white men – white men who have been dead a long time, did some ugly things, by the way, in the case of slavery, they had a lot of black men helping them.

But the conventional wisdom solution is insane. Most people don’t realize that the job market is a zero sum game. By that I mean that if you force someone to hire someone who’s less qualified because of the color of his skin, you’re also taking a job away someone who earned it – just because his skin is white.

And in most cases, the “someone” in question is a young person – just starting out in their career.

And here’s the cruel irony of the whole thing — most young people are not born racist, biased, or discriminatory when they – they learn it from older people.

So how to we teach them to not discriminate?

We re-engineer society to discriminate against them – our own young people.

Meanwhile, we live in a country with a black president – that’s good! And I live in a state with a black governor – even better! Yet we just keep cranking up the rhetoric about the need for more diversity, or as President Obama calls it – Social Justice.

In the meantime, we continue to sacrifice white male children career’s in the name of diversity.

Maybe that not’s perverse, but it certainly doesn’t feel right, and I’m not sure it’s actually helping to solve the problem.

This Week on The Career Mechanic  — “The Times They Are A Changing”
Click HERE to Listen

After almost 50 years of Affirmative Action, diversity has become deeply engrained in the workplace culture. This week we’ll be joined by noted affirmative action expert and author of the book “The Diversity Machine” Dr. Fredrick Lynch, a New England firefighter – who will be with us incognito, and Jim Craig, the Olympic hockey legend for the 1980 miracle team that beat the Russians about the similarities between 1980 and today

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