I saw on television there was a decent turnout at the state capitol protests yesterday. I felt bad for not trying to get to one, but I’ve been really slammed with arthritis pain in my knees recently. I saw an orthopedic guy yesterday who gave me a steroid shot in one knee (the other is beyond help, apparently) and am in much less pain today. But it’s safe to say my marching in the streets days are over, unless I can get my hands on a wheelchair and someone to push it. Younger people will have to do the marching now.
There’s so much going on it’s hard to keep up. But one of the first headlines to jump out at me today was at Slate, Pam Bondi Instructs Trump DOJ to Criminally Investigate Companies That Do DEI. This is by Jeremy Stahl and Mark Joseph Stern.
One astonishing memo, seen by Slate, puts the DOJ at the center of President Donald Trump’s widespread efforts to destroy any traces of initiatives that would create inclusive and diverse workspaces, otherwise known as DEIA. The new memo claims that it will target private-sector diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility initiatives for potential “criminal investigation.”
In other words, the government is going to interfere with the hiring practices of private companies. And the righties will say that’s what Affirmative Action did, but frankly Affirmative Action was about protecting individual citizens from discrimination. And the righties will say that now White men are being discriminated against, and I will say, yeah, and I’m King Charles.
I am sure I’ve preached this sermon before, about how I grew up in a “sundown town” and was around White racists a big chunk of my life, Something I realized while I was still a young person was that the White guys who were the most openly bigoted were relentlessly … ordinary. They weren’t especially smart, or accomplished, or exceptional in any way except for being loudmouth bigots. And most of them were living standard middle-class lives, with ok jobs and a decent home and the usual accoutrements of average Americana. But they believed they were owed all the goodies the American Dream had to offer, and if their lives weren’t fulfilling their expectations it must be the fault of those other people.
It’s also the case that a lot of them clung to their identity as a White male as the one thing that made them special. They couldn’t face being relentlessly ordinary. See also something I wrote in 2017, The Myths That Guide Us.
This is an entirely subjective opinion not backed up by scholarly studies, but I know my people. I sincerely believe a whole lot of these guys go down the white supremacy rabbit hole because they’ve come to live inside a myth that says their whiteness entitles them to greatness. In their own minds they are the heirs to a noble tradition of warrior-men who eventually will return in glory and re-assert their natural superiority over all those other people. And yeah, it’s nonsense, but it’s a fantasy that helps them avoid confronting how utterly banal they and their lives actually are.
Many of the people in the Trump Administration fit the categories of “banal” and “ordinary,” but they got pushed up ladders because they were loudmouth advocates of the White supremacist fantasy that won’t die.
Part of the fantasy is that DEI programs require quotas, meaning that somehow more-qualified White guys lose jobs to less-qualified minorities or women in order to fill a quota. But quotas are illegal, according to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. DEI means that companies should not be hiring and promoting less-qualified White guys over better-qualified minorities and women. This is a concept alien to a bigot, of course.
When I graduated college in 1973 Affirmative Action was just going into effect, and it was only because of that that at least some of my highly accomplished sister graduates were considered for professional jobs and not automatically dumped into secretarial pools. The best jobs, of course, automatically went to the White guys, including some very average ones.
In most of my early career in book publishing — which is a female intensive industry — in the 1970s and 1980s, I still saw very average — and sometimes downright stupid — White guys promoted over the heads of women with more experience and skills. (And as I recall there were few racial minorities in publishing in those days. That didn’t start to change until the 1990s.) The rule seemed to be that a White guy was considered competent, even with copious evidence to the contrary, as long as he didn’t burn down the building. Women and minorities were assumed to be less competent until they had put in a few years proving themselves with exceptional service to the company. And then maybe they’d be allowed up the ladder just a step.
I’ve worked for a couple of male managers who were so colossally stupid they were clearly costing the company tons of money. One guy rendered the entire department of a relatively small company nearly dysfunctional before the owner noticed there was a problem — book schedules were blown, books were published with sections missing, books were printed with pages of gibberish that nobody noticed — and even then he brought in a (male) consultant to evaluate the situation. The consultant, bless him, recommended firing the stupid manager. This was in the 1970s; this was the “meritocracy” Trump wants to take us back to.
A long time ago I read an argument that the problem was not so much that there were huge barriers to women and minorities, but that White men often got too many passes to move up without deserving it. That may have become less true over time, but it never entirely went away.
See also a post from back in 2009, The Default Norm, about Sonia Sotomayor’s confirmation hearing to be a Supreme Court justice. The hearings painfully exposed that many of the Senators harbored the perspective that White maleness is the default human norm, and anyone else must be assumed to be less normal and treated differently.
And, of course, over the years I’ve had some excellent male managers and some clunky female managers, but on the whole by the time we got into the 1990s there seemed to be less discrimination — in publishing, anyway, I can’t speak for other industries — and more putting people into jobs they could actually do, regardless of sex or skin color. It did American business a lot of good, I suspect. I also suspect that companies that develop and sell consumer products, recreation, entertainment, that kind of thing, and who want customers of all races and genders, find that having a diverse workforce is very useful in that regard. White guys alone tend to be oblivious to what might interest and appeal to other people. Many large companies have come to appreciate that diversity is good for their bottom lines.
Government is lagging behind. I found a 2021 study that said White men are 30 percent of the U.S. population but hold 62 percent of all elected offices.
What exactly is Bondi going to investigate? Did a company send recruiters to Howard University, for example? Is that going to be criminal now? Are more women and minorities than White Men (who are only 30 percent of the U.S. population, after all) being hired by some company? Is that criminal now?
And does Bondi appreciate that Sandra Day O’Connor, after graduating near the top of her law school class in 1952, was offered no jobs with a legal firm except as a legal secretary? She eventually got a first professional job as a county deputy attorney after offering to work without compensation. And were it not for feminists in the 1960s and 1970s making noises about women’s equality, I doubt it would have occurred to Ronald Reagan to nominate a woman to the Supreme Court. Or maybe he was trying to prove something after having opposed the Equal Rights Amendment.
And for years the Right whined that any government interference with private business was socialism. I guess they’ve changed their minds.
Stuff to Read
Highly recommended — Josh Marshall, The Three-Headed Chimera of Trumpian Destruction
David Frum, The Atlantic, How Trump Lost His Trade War
Timothy W. Ryback, The Atlantic, The Oligarchs Who Came to Regret Supporting Hitler
Paul Krugman, RFK Jr. and the MAGA Death Trip
Dana Milbank, Washington Post, From the river to the sea, Palestine will be … abolished?
MSN/WaPo, Gutting USAID threatens billions of dollars for U.S. farms, businesses
This isn’t even getting into the last in what Elon Musk has been up to. It’s too much.
