Dakota Beacon

One of the worst aspects of life today - today as opposed to ten years ago, pre-Obama era - is the pigeon-holing of people into racial categories.  This is something we had nearly shaken off by 2008.  Sadly, instead of being a unifying figure, Obama used his bully pulpit and celebrity to drill down on the topic of race.  Suddenly we were thrown back into the mid-20th Century racial consciousness.  Damn!  And we were just getting over all that and treating each other more or less like fellow humans.  

There is always something we can do to improve something, our own approach to things, our institutions, but overall, America has always provided more opportunity to more people of diverse backgrounds than any other nation anywhere.  If we are to do better, the path to follow or to forge, would be to view each other as far as possible as individuals.  We were created as individuals.  Each of us is unique.  If you have children, you know that even with as much shared experience and genetic heritage as they all have, each is distinctly different, with different talents, ideas, personalities and interests.   Just as two siblings are different from one another so are we all.  

Our considerable success as a nation and a culture is due not to measuring out our external properties - the color of our skin, the sexes, but rather the enthusiasm, intelligence, creativity, insight of the people.  To the extent we have focused on the external we have been less successful; to the extent we have focused on the internal characteristics we have benefited.  

Today, in 2021, however, we have turned things around once again.  We are headed back to the pre-World War II era of race relations.  Race is no longer irrelevant.  Now our schools are formally teaching our children that the ones of them who are white are born racists.  Our companies, such as Coca Cola and others are purging themselves of what they think is evidence of whiteness.  White is now “bad” in and of itself.  What underlies this new direction is not a natural evolution of society but rather an insidious, poisonous malaise of unnatural creation.  It is a new take on the old Marxist doctrine of “dialectic materialism” - class warfare, only in America, where class is really irrelevant (and always has been) it has been adapted to racial warfare, because we do have a more diverse population than was available to disrupt in 19th Century Russia.  

Our schools have fostered this, not only as in the above example, but also in regard to people’s gender dysphoria.  Now we are all looking over our shoulders wondering which monster is going to sneak up on us next.  Think back to 1990.  Could you have imagined back then that today our little kids in kindergarten would be indoctrinated every hour of every day that all white children are evil and racist?  No?  Me either, but here we are.  

So today I opened an email and found an article by a young journalist.  It was “tips” for questions one should ask during a job interview.  I’ll let you judge for yourself.

My reaction is this.  

(“Can you explain what your company has done to ensure every employee feels included?”)

Bang!  Right out of the gate with this one.  Well, if you are really concerned about this, you should have done some research as to whether there have been accidents or injury claims against the company.  You could have checked on this when you were doing your other research about what the company does or makes, what it has announced in terms of plans and goals and such.  Most workplaces adhere to at least a minimum standard of safety.  If they don’t, OSHA inspectors will, at least theoretically, land on them with both feet.  But obviously when Ms Surles talks about feeling “safe” and “supported” and “taken care of”, she’s not talking about physical safety.  She is talking about some sort of comfy zone where everyone is feeling the valium and performance need not be a factor.  Since when are employees supposed to feel “safe” and “supported” and “taken care of”?  Is this what adults focus on?  I’d say that an adult would be concerned with opportunities to apply their skills, their ideas, their abilities to move up in the company.  Not to be “taken care of”.  That is for the nursery.

(“What are your company’s most essential values?”)

What do you suppose she’s hunting for here?  Well, she goes on to tell us - that this will help to determine whether their culture and values match yours.  So it would probably follow that if the culture is one of competitiveness, or of meeting goals, or of shining in comparison to the competition, or bringing something new to the marketplace, a new service, a better service, a new idea, a new or improved product, this probably wouldn’t be what Ms Surles would be looking for.  She implies that the “right” answer would be more like a pot-luck paper-chain-making committee or a sort of protest group that could take the day off to demonstrate solidarity with maybe planned parenthood.  I love pot-luck lunch hours at an office!  I worked at one where a large staff of hard-working ladies periodically celebrated a birthday or a holiday by bringing homemade bread, crocks of soup or chili, chips, dips, sauces, you name it.  They were fantastic cooks and I loved every one of them.  But it wasn’t what we went to work for.  It was something we did that made work go faster, seem lighter.  We didn’t even think about whether it was “inclusive”.  Of course it was.  No one bothered about whether we were one color or another, one religion or another.  We all enjoyed it and the pleasant company that went with it, the conversation, the camaraderie.  And then we went back to our desks and got back to work.  And got the work done.  Because that was why we were hired.

(“Could you provide data that shows the amount of diversity throughout the organization?”)  

Imagine that.  The employer who has chosen to take time to interview you for a job you purport to want and he or she wants to fill is now assigned by you to put together a report, come up with some satisfactory proof that there is diversity and in sufficient “amount” to satisfy you?  First, just look at the premise here.  It has been said that the job seeker sort of interviews the employer and that is good up to a point - one wants to know if he’s a good fit for the job and the employer and the office.  But good grief.  Now the job seeker is demanding some sort of hard evidence that your company is diverse enough for him or her?  Is there some virtue in measuring candidates for employment by quantities in terms of racial makeup?  We just heard how the royal family of Britain was accused of racism for wondering aloud how dark young Master Archie’s skin would be.  It was distasteful to everyone, especially the people accused of this.  Why is it disgusting for them to do this (if, indeed, they did), but virtuous for the human resources department of your company?  We shouldn’t be talking about race.  When someone asked the great economist and philosopher, Thomas Sowell, what we should be doing to improve race relations, he said something to the effect of, “quit talking about it.”

He was so right.  And think about it - what could be more boring?  What is inside the mind and soul of someone is at least potentially infinitely more valuable and interesting than what color he is.  Why is this so very important to this applicant?  

(How inclusive is your company’s executive team?)

Maybe a better approach would be to ask not how “inclusive” it is, but maybe the stories of those who made it to the top in your company?  Do you promote from within?  Do you hire outside talent for the top positions?  Is promotion based more on merit?  How is merit demonstrated?  What is the yardstick?  What the hell does being “inclusive” have to do with your top tier?  I would personally be suspicious of a company that promoted people to be “inclusive” rather than people who have shown dedication, openness to creative ideas and ability to get things done.  This isn’t supposed to be a sleepover, is it?  By placing “inclusiveness” at the top of your list of qualities for your leadership team you basically take away opportunities from creative, hard-working, talented people and deny them in the name of “inclusiveness”, taking away their own agency.  Making them helpless.  Let’s be honest.  “Inclusive” refers to race.  It's a euphemism for tokenism.  It detracts from the person who benefits from it just as it does from the person who doesn’t.  It is also demeaning of the racial or whatever minority group is, to be benefitted to because it implies that these people can’t contribute and must be artificially advanced.  It is blatantly racist to think in these terms, inherently insulting.

(“Are there any training programs intact to support diversity?  If not, are you expecting to create one in the future?”)

I would think this kind of question would be really off-putting to an employer.  It is telling that this young woman would have you ask about training programs to support “diversity”, rather than programs designed to help train the employees to be more skilled, to develop their leadership abilities, to enrich them, to encourage them to contribute to the whole.  The journalist who wrote this article would have the employer roll up his sleeves and consult with her about how to retrain the company and its staff to accommodate her social needs and apparent insecurities, more like the client of a consulting firm than a prospective employer.  I know if I were asking about training programs I would be likely to ask about the possibility of funding for advanced courses or special training in the field I was to work in, not what the company has in the works to cure my own neurosis.

It is interesting, is it not, that “inclusiveness” in practice really means a sort of exclusive, segregationist attitude?  We are definitely hurtling backwards in terms of our inter-racial relations in America today.  And is anyone else out there as sick as I am of the word, “safe”?  

Here is what I wrote back to the company which supplied this advice:

Are you serious?  If I were hiring and someone sitting in my office for an interview asked me these questions, I would politely conclude the interview and look for another prospective employee.  Since when did the workplace transform itself into some sort of social engineering laboratory?  The best thing to do if your chief interest is in what the company is going to do to make you feel "included" would be to start your own company.  If I am running a company my chief interest will be the success of the company.  This would logically be based on a spirit of cooperation and shared values and goals.  If the company does well the employees should benefit.  It shouldn't matter if they are men or women, what race they call themselves, what their religion is, but rather their shared interest in making the company succeed.  

Too many people seem to be spending altogether too much time in school.  They are not learning useful things there.  They are learning that everything is all about them.  They are being taught that they are the center of the universe and that all company policies should revolve around their perceived needs.  This is a disservice to these young people.  Our country's story of success has been based upon hard work, opportunities to start new businesses, taking measured risks, innovation.  Not on social justice engineering or manipulation of demographics in the workplace.  This is irrelevant.  I hope the young writer of this foolish piece steps back from it and considers other relevant points of view - such as those of the person who is making the job possible.  Only then will she merit the kind of consideration she is demanding up front. 

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