#1516 The D Word

 

…25God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds, the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that crawls upon the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. 26Then God said, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness, to rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, and over all the earth itself and every creature that crawls upon it.” 27So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.…Genesis 1: 25-27

…19By the sweat of your brow you will eat your bread, until you return to the ground—because out of it were you taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” 20And Adam named his wife Eve, because she would be the mother of all the living. Genesis 3: 19-20

I believe the Bible to be God's word, and so as a Christian, a follower of Christ, Who was the Word become flesh to dwell among us, I take my world view from here. As far as diversity goes, I believe, according to Scripture, that every human being comes from Adam and Eve. Even modern science, though much slower than the Bible, would agree that all humans have a shared common parentage, not races, but rather the human race. We are all related to one another, and so racism is a foolish concept. We are all made in the image of God, and so therein is the ultimate premise for equality. In the corporate world, as far as hiring, I have never had to worry about diversity and inclusion because I don't hire those traits. I hire for skill, experience, and where I can detect it, integrity. Once you are hired then my job shifts to behaviors, does he or she come in as scheduled, on time? Do they get along with the other employees and treat them with respect? Do they do their work? Are they lazy? etc. 

In recent years, and I find it unfortunate, there has been much talk about DEI, CRT and other programs that take the focus off of the actual job, it's genuine requirements, and focus on things like melanin levels, and or sexual preferences, which should not keep someone from having a job in the corporation, but should also not give preferential treatment or means to bypass legitimate qualifications. I will give you a real world example:

We had a board of 5 individuals, including myself, and we were interviewing people for a position in a new area. We had finished interviewing 3 gentlemen and were now interviewing a young lady. She was a wonderful person, very polite, easy to get along with, but she was struggling with the questions relating to the job. We take notes during these interviews and at the end we all vote, and we had agreed to a process where everyone had to be unanimous or we moved to the next individual or asked for another interview. We voted and I was the only no vote, the only one that didn't agree to hire her for that position. Someone even went so far as to call me sexist. So I asked them, why, after interviewing 3 other people, who all answered the technical questions better, (one I disqualified for a behavioral issue, but 2 others were better interviews with experience that aligned better with the job), are we passing on them and picking her? One of my peers answered, "because I think diversity and inclusion are important." I asked him, "so you are going to hire her because she's a girl?" He restated, "I think diversity is important." They all held to this and patted themselves on the back like they had made some great moral stand, but in actuality they had done the opposite of what they were congratulating themselves for. You see, if you tell me to hire someone because they are a girl, then that is patently sexist, and if you tell me to hire someone because they are hypomelanistic or hypermelanistic then that is the clinical definition of racist. The story with that girl didn't end there though, my colleagues offered her the job, she accepted, but then later declined. Her reasoning? In her own words she declined because she was "not qualified"  for the position. In their race to score social brownie points on the latest snake oil chart, my colleagues had stooped to being dishonest and unprofessional, but the young lady told the truth. I told my bosses and peers that I would like to hire her now, and they asked why? I said, "because she's more honest than you, and I could train her to do the hiring with me and probably build a much better team." They rolled their eyes and moved on probably learning nothing, but this has been a problem with many of these programs. They are all based on racism or sexism or whatever ism of the week as being the issue as to why there are so few girls, people of color, gay people, etc. in the particular positions that are being discussed. The snake oil salesmen require these conditions in order for you to buy the treatment that they are selling for it. They never ask, "how many of the people that apply are female?" I can say that from my own experience it's probably in the neighborhood of 1 in 50 for the tech positions, maybe less that were female. That is changing in more recent years with apprentice programs, but those are the odds, and so it's far more likely that I will hire a male statistically, just from those numbers. I am looking for the best person for the job, most qualified, best team player, most experienced, and that has nothing to do with gender, race or sexual orientation. The snake oil salesman can't make his money that way though, but when you break down his program it almost always, without exception, makes racism the answer to racism, sexism the answer to sexism and so on. 

Here's an article by a very good, rational Economist, Walter E. Williams, and if anything I hope it just causes people to think rather than knee jerk and band wagon. I will continue with Equity in the next post.

by Walter E. Williams

Recently by Walter E. Williams: Department of Injustice

The terms affirmative action, equal representation, preferential treatment and quotas just don’t sell well. The intellectual elite and their media, government and corporate enthusiasts have come up with diversity, a seemingly benign term that’s a cover for racially discriminatory policy. They call for college campuses, corporate offices and government agencies to “look like America.”

Part of looking like America means if blacks are 13 percent of the population, they should be 13 percent of college students and professors, corporate managers and government employees. Behind this vision of justice is the silly notion that but for the fact of discrimination, we’d be distributed equally by race across incomes, education, occupations and other outcomes. There is absolutely no evidence that statistical proportionality is the norm anywhere on Earth; however, much of our thinking, laws and public policy is based upon proportionality being the norm. Let’s look at some racial differences whilst thinking about their causes and possible remedies.

While 13 percent of our population, blacks are 80 percent of professional basketball players and 65 percent of professional football players and are the highest paid players in both sports. By contrast, blacks are only 2 percent of NHL’s professional ice hockey players. There is no racial diversity in basketball, football and ice hockey. They come nowhere close to “looking like America.”

Even in terms of sports achievement, racial diversity is absent. Four out of the five highest career home-run hitters were black. Since blacks entered the major leagues, of the eight times more than 100 bases were stolen in a season, all were by blacks.

The U.S. Department of Justice recently ordered Dayton, Ohio’s police department to lower its written exam passing scores so as to have more blacks on its police force. What should Attorney General Eric Holder do about the lack of diversity in sports? Why don’t the intellectual elite protest? Could it be that the owners of these multi-billion-dollar professional basketball, football and baseball teams are pro-black while those of the NHL and major industries are racists unwilling to put blacks in highly paid positions?

There’s one ethnic diversity issue completely swept under the rug. Jewish Americans are less than 3 percent of our population and only two-tenths of 1 percent of the world’s population. Yet between 1901 and 2010, Jews were 35 percent of American Nobel Laureate winners and 22 percent of the world’s.

If the diversity gang sees underrepresentation as “probative” of racial discrimination, what do they propose we do about overrepresentation? Because if one race is overrepresented, it might mean they’re taking away what rightfully belongs to another race.

There are other representation issues to which we might give some attention with an eye to corrective public policy. Asians routinely get the highest scores on the math portion of the SAT while blacks get the lowest. Men are 50 percent of the population and so are women; yet men are struck by lightning six times as often as women. The population statistics for South Dakota, Iowa, Maine, Montana and Vermont show that not even 1 percent of their populations is black. On the other hand, in states such as Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, blacks are overrepresented in terms of their percentages in the general population.

There are many international examples of disproportionality. For example, during the 1960s, the Chinese minority in Malaysia received more university degrees than the Malay majority – including 400 engineering degrees compared with four for the Malays, even though Malays dominate the country politically. In Brazil’s state of Sao Paulo, more than two-thirds of the potatoes and 90 percent of the tomatoes produced were produced by people of Japanese ancestry.

The bottom line is there no evidence anywhere that but for discrimination, people would be divided according to their percentages in the population in any activity. Diversity is an elitist term used to give respectability to acts and policy that would otherwise be deemed as racism.

Walter E. Williams is the John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics at George Mason University, and a nationally syndicated columnist. To find out more about Walter E. Williams and read features by other Creators Syndicate columnists and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page.

…27For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. 28There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s seed and heirs according to the promise.… Galatians 3: 27-29

Catfish and Cheese grits from BLM answer