Our world changed last year in the wake of George “Foamy Mouth” Floyd’s meth plus fentanyl assisted suicide. The Wall Street Journal’s Dan Henninger sums it up nicely:
After last summer’s protests, it was clear there would be a public reconsideration of racial issues in the U.S. Within six months, it was off the rails.
Virtue signaling CEOs across North America and Europe whipped themselves as bloody as a Shiite Ashura marcher. Prostrating before city burning Antifa, BLM Marxists, and harpy led Twatter mobs they promised social justice, racial equity, and diversity – aka quotas – in all aspects of their businesses. We’re looking at you Coke, Delta, Nike, MLB, NFL, NBA, PnG, American Airlines, and countless others. Sounds nice, but these are the flowery words that invite a bloody revolution.
The Railer saw this in his workplace as a widespread old-white-male flush. It started with a crocodile teared missive from the white male CEO talking about the Floyd tragedy and how the corporation would respond with an increased focus on diversity and inclusion. Discretely, he tasked a high-ranking female executive to remake the organization. Soon, the inbox was stuffed with corporate announcements congratulating the latest woman or minority ascendee’.
The new global queen of sales, a latinx (triple intersectional score: woman + Hispanic + delete-white-male), was coronated on a company call along the lines of: “we’d like to introduce our new queen of sales, who exemplifies our commitment to diversity and inclusion… blah, blah, blah.” The Railer and a beloved lefty coworker oddly had the exact same reaction. If anyone introduced me that way, I’d resign. I want to be in a job because I’m the best choice, not because my particular skin or genitalia construct checks boxes. La Reya may, in fact, be an amazing executive. But the diversity penumbra shades her qualifications.
Left unsaid in the collective 2020 equity fiesta was the fate of the talented, experienced, white males. It was a list of 50 and 60 somethings quietly ushered down the ladder or out the door. The Railer was invited to join that parade which he did with an upbeat wave and a smile. Why the smile? The Railer feared that his recent detour back to giant-woke-tech-corp world was a mistake. It was, and he’s already on a new payroll at a smaller firm that values knowledge and skills over skin and parts. It pays to keep a parachute packed and ready these days. His replacement? A recent grad whose name derives from the Arabic word for “master.” No irony there.
Ditching woke-corp can be a liberating change. For example, without the diversity ceiling, there would be no Dilbert. What, you say? Scott Adams, the creative genius behind it, coined the term after he was punished twice for his race and gender. He writes about it in his excellent and practical book, “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win.”
This Adam’s story comes from the late 1980’s. Read along on page 42:
My banking career ended when my boss called me into her office and informed me that the order had come down to stop promoting white males. The press had noticed that senior management was composed almost entirely of white males, and the company needed to work harder to achieve something called diversity. No one knew how long that might take, so I put my resume together and sent it to some of the other big companies in the area.
He left the firm shortly thereafter. A few years later, working for Pacific Bell, Adams describes overt racism-sexism part deux on page 44.
One day a district manager position opened and I was a contender, or so I thought. My boss’s boss’s boss called me into his office and explained that the order had come down to stop promoting white males. Pacific Bell had a diversity problem, and it might take years to fix it. if it was ever fixed. My bid for upper management at Pacific Bell was officially a failure. On the plus side, I no longer felt the need to give my employer my best efforts, or even to occasionally work long hours for no extra pay. It was an unwanted freedom, but freedom nonetheless. I took some time to work on my tennis game and I started thinking seriously about a new direction, ideally one that didn’t require me to have a boss.
Scott Adams found his new direction writing and drawing Dilbert, fulfilling his boss-free dream. He also offers a warning that Woke US Corpses [sic] should ponder. Realizing that his ladder climbing ambitions were fruitless, that his loyalty and contributions were unrewardable, he lowered his energy and value to his employer. That is a common but completely unacknowledged response. How much productivity and innovation are corporations losing by kneecapping and discouraging so many of their best people?
Scott Adams is as bright and capable as anyone, yet, he was disqualified because of his skin color and genitalia. If it happened to him twice, years ago when the racist diversity and equity Nazis held much less sway, imagine the plight of a generic white male in today’s uber-woke corporate or government climate.
The Railer has his own similar story from 35 years ago, an innocence busting moment while working at a government technology agency. The Railer’s contract work supported a key spacecraft comm system and the agency expert was ready to retire. The Railer had just landed his Master’s-of-Science Degree after several hard years of night school. His agency counterpart had promised a transfer from contractor to government badge at that milestone which would offer better pay, benefits, and opportunities. Everything was aligned for success. But, then came the words “we’re only hiring funny names and females.” The grizzled manager, a proud veteran, spat the words as the racist-sexist edict came right from the top floor of Building One.
Think about that a moment. Our government wouldn’t hire The Railer because of his race and gender, and, they could openly say that without consequence. Back then, The Railer naively believed that our nation, post-Civil Rights, had advanced beyond tribalism. Nope.
Like Scott Adams, The Railer packed up and left. It was a gift because it was becoming obvious to everyone, especially the old-timers, the WWII GI Bill educated vets who put men on the moon a decade before, that white males were suddenly less valued.
The Railer’s next employ, with a raise and a promotion, was a Texas based defense contractor. Life was good and the work atmosphere had a cowboy swagger, a “we can do anything” ethos. Work life degraded after a 1990’s acquisition by a giant Northeast based defense firm. Diversity became mission number one. Women with little knowledge or experience were soon “managing” teams of more senior, mostly male engineers. Women and minority new hires received eye-popping pay and stock options, numbers and perks never seen by the experienced folks doing the work. Every government contractor coast-to-coast was competing for the same tiny handful of diverse engineering graduates. The disparate largesse was supposed to be a secret… but the truth leaked out as it usually does.
Something else happened. The design work dried up. The site stopped winning contracts. The nuts-and-bolts design teams that could imagine and build advanced military hardware withered away. The talent level dropped, and the few new male engineers came from Puerto Rico. The site is still open but now a shadow of its former self. A shriveled but diverse engineering team writes a little software, shuffles papers in production support, and supervises hourly assembly labor that builds hardware designed elsewhere.
Considered another way, how much stronger are Chinese companies? They don’t waste mindshare and resources obsessing over diversities and inclusions. They are instead single mindedly focused on dominating whatever industry they enter – which they do. We can afford to indulge crippling woke socialist whims if we are a rich and powerful nation. Self-destructive, self-inflicted handicapping will eventually erase that luxury. Who, Dear Reader, will win this contest?
Race and gender discrimination is wrong. It was wrong when brown people and women held the short straws. It is wrong now that the oppressed are white males and Asians. The Railer hopes that the Supreme Court will soon find the courage to finally affirm our nation’s ideals: that we are individuals, that our lives and liberties are not superficially determined.
Until that time, if you were born a low privilege white male, your alternative is to sell your time and talents to smaller outfits. Look for privately held firms that don’t serve government and lack a Chief Diversity Officer or VP of Inclusion. Better yet, start a company, or pair yourself with a smart woman or minority and play their diversity game. Experience shows that most of those “disadvantaged” enterprises are frauds, a low diversity firm with a minority facade. If your personal integrity is on the low side, you can play a Liz Warren “I’m a native American” card. Make it up as there is no objective standard. All you need to be gay is to say “I’m gay,” and wave a rainbow flag during June. No one is allowed to question it. Call anyone who questions your identity a racist/sexist/homotransislamopedopolyphobe. Isn’t that the ticket Rachel Dolezal? The most underutilized talent in America today is not women and minorities, it is wasting away in the ranks of openly oppressed and rightfully discouraged white males, the people who have been told for 50 years now, “go to the back of the line.”