(Nota Bene: In this context, AA means “Affirmative Action,” not “Alcoholics Anonymous.” – FWP)
Our favorite Graybeard puts the case as plainly as possible:
I retired just over nine years ago, and DEI was far less prominent in everyday use than it is today, but another term was used that had the same effects. That was Affirmative Action. At some point, everyone started to know what it meant to say someone was an affirmative action hire. Everyone besides that affirmative action hire knew it meant taking extra time and effort to get the job done.
The problem, of course, was that as it became apparent that all the affirmative action hires were part of the same ethnic or identity group every member of that group was assumed to be an AA hire until they proved otherwise – by being good at their job.
The phrase “an AA hire” has become a classic of contemptuous dismissal. No one wants to be called “an AA hire.” No one wants to be classed as substandard at his occupation. To be tarred that way can have effects that last lifelong.
But the condition is like a case of congenital syphilis, and just as deadly. The “AA hire” is not responsible for his plight; someone else, who felt himself to be under pressure to do so, decided to hire him. Having been hired for a reason other than competence is injurious not only to him but to everyone who shares his race, sex, or ethnicity. It’s a point Thomas Sowell has made on several occasions.
The disease is rooted in the desire among politicians to exploit a tribal loyalty: i.e., the desire to purchase votes and support en bloc. (“I’ll have those niggers voting Democrat for the next two hundred years.” – Lyndon Baines Johnson) When the tribe at issue is statistically markedly different from the rest of the population, the consequences can only be as Gray has stated: substandard workers hired for political reasons pull down the efforts of the rest, while the genuinely competent have to prove and re-prove themselves to avoid being tarred with the AA brush. The DEI phenomenon merely broadened and intensified the dynamic.
The more interesting question is why such a tribe is willing to accept such treatment. The answer is multicausal, but its components, while easily isolated, are not easily addressed. And with that, I leave the subject to my Gentle Readers.
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the same can be said of females in the workplace. There are so few of them that are competent — “substandard workers hired for political reasons pull down the efforts of the rest, while the genuinely competent have to prove and re-prove themselves to avoid being tarred with the AA brush.”
Yep. But the ‘Wise Latina’ now on the SCOTUS doesn’t understand this.
I really didn’t encounter this until I began working in the corporate world. Back in ‘92 I began working at a fortune 500 company that is no longer in existence. We had one black guy in our group who was the poster child for getting rid of quota hires (which is what they used to be called) and he ticked off every box; always showing up late/wanting to leave early, not meeting deadlines, etc. One Friday he called in and said his mother-in-law had passed, to which our supervisor said after he hung up the phone, “This makes it the third time now.”
One day we were doing annual reviews and I was in my supervisors office when he got called away for a moment. I looked down the hall and he was engaged in a conversation with his supervisor, the quota hires folder was under mine and I deftly took a look through it. He had been there for almost a year longer than me and during that time, he had racked up nine complaints, several of them by women who were put out because he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. One month after that I was walking down the hall and he was walking in the opposite direction and wrapped his arm around a female co-worker, saying hello. This woman was visibly shaken and threw his arm off of her, after which she literally ran away. There were a number of other people in the hall who witnessed this and they all looked at him in disbelief.
This was right around the time of Clinton’s first term, where one of his picks for a cabinet pick had a harassment problem. I said to this guy that in the current climate, he’d be out of his mind putting his hands on a female co-worker. He responded by saying, “Maybe for a White boy like you, but not me. I’m the only brother in this department. If they fire me, they’ve got a multi-million dollar lawsuit on their hands and they know it.”
i was taken aback by the sheer audacity of his statement and I mentioned it to a co-worker who kind of witnessed the exchange. He’d been working there three years longer than the both of us and he simply said, “Oh yeah, and then some. Yeah he pretty much began marking his territory about a month after he got here. I’m surprised he hasn’t pissed on the carpet in some offices and yes, he likes to throw his weight around. This, despite the fact that he hasn’t pulled his weight since he got here.”
It was another eight months before he got canned and the only reason he was, was because a complaint was filed against him by a black female. They figured that given her race, he didn’t have a leg to stand on if he threw out the race card. Unfortunately, this guy was replaced a few weeks later with a black female. She did her work, but she made it clear that although she worked in our department, she wasn’t part of our department. We went out of our way to ignore the first guy, but everyone walked around eggshells with the female and that was much worse.
As a result of this and a few other incidents on other jobs I later worked on, ANY minority I worked with I automatically treated them as a quota hire. Some proved themselves to be decent people, many others were horror shows.
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It’s cost them, especially the Negroes. White-collar employers are getting canny about their hiring practices, so as to avoid even having Negroes apply for jobs with them.