DEI or R&R? Part Two

In this post, I noted that white representation among undergraduates at some elite colleges has dropped well below white representation among students graduating from high school (about 45 percent). In fact, at Johns Hopkins whites made up only 17 percent of the entering class in 2022.

Numbers like that can’t be explained by the desire to achieve “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” In fact, as I pointed out, such numbers run contrary to “equity,” even as improperly defined by the DEI movement.

The low level of whites accepted at elite colleges and the unstinting race discrimination needed to attain those numbers can only be explained by the quest for reparations for blacks and retribution for whites (“R&R”). Or so I argued.

Now, Bloomberg reports that in 2021, only 6 percent of those hired at S&P 100 companies were white. The remaining 94 percent were “people of color” Blacks got 23 percent of them and Hispanics got 40 percent, according to Bloomberg’s analysis.

These numbers are obscenely disproportionate to the representation of these three groups in the population and the labor force. They would establish the existence of racial discrimination against whites to the satisfaction of any rational trier of fact. {NOTE: Bloomberg’s analysis is criticized, persuasively I think, in this post at the Daily Wire.]

Are the numbers somehow justified by the need to promote diversity and inclusion? One might be able to make that case if blacks and Hispanics had been excluded from entry level jobs in the workforces of S&P 100 firms. But there’s no evidence that this was the case, and it pretty clearly is not. Indeed, it’s highly implausible to imagine that firms that decided nearly to freeze the hiring of whites in 2021 in favor of blacks and Hispanics were excluding blacks and Hispanics in the immediately preceding years.

Moreover, S&P 100 companies are subject to the Executive Order banning discrimination by federal contractors. Accordingly, they must submit data about the racial and ethnic composition of their workforce to the Labor Department, along with “goals and timetables” for curing any racial imbalances.

If such companies were excluding blacks and/or Hispanics from positions to the point that a near-freeze on white hiring was necessary to cure imbalances, the Labor Department would already have stepped in. But the 2021 near-hiring freeze on whites was not the result of government intervention. It was voluntary.

Why did corporate America discriminate so blatantly against whites in 2021? It did so in response to the killing of George Floyd and its over-the-top aftermath. This is clear from Bloomberg’s report. Following the Floyd killing and the mass protests, big firms “promised to hire a lot more people of color” and “[they] actually did.” [As noted above, there are serious questions as to whether the Bloomberg numbers that indicate such blatant discrimination are accurate.]

But further explanation is required. Big firms could have hired “a lot more people of color” without bringing white hiring down to 6 percent. Thus, there was more going on here than reparations for the Floyd killing and for past discrimination against blacks and Hispanics in general. It seems clear that the near-hiring freeze of whites was also a kind of retribution against whites.

My “reparations and retribution” theory finds further support in two more “Rs” that originate not with me, but with the BLM movement and its media sympathizers. I’m referring to the oft-repeated term “racial reckoning.”

What elite colleges and big corporate employers are doing demonstrates that this “reckoning” goes beyond harping on America’s racist history, which was already happening before Floyd was killed. It extends to punishing young, allegedly privileged whites who seek college admission or a job. They must suffer for the sins of slaveholders, of Woodrow Wilson and George Wallace, and of Derek Chauvin.

Because blacks were once second-class citizens and, even with the benefit of widespread racial preferences, still lag behind whites when it comes to success in our meritocracy, whites deserve to be treated as second-class citizens. That’s become part of the racial reckoning.

Is this part of the reckoning sustainable? I doubt it. Indeed, it’s very likely that corporate hiring practices are returning to more normal patterns. Even college admissions patterns will likely become less discriminatory due to the Supreme Court’s rulings, although massive resistance by colleges and universities will probably mean that they remain unfair to whites and Asian-Americans.

The racial reckoning is due for a reckoning of its own.