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> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men. This is what he claims but I find it very difficult to believe. Why would managemen
by bahmboo 9mo ago
> He was told explicitly by his boss that they weren't promoting white men.
This is what he claims but I find it very difficult to believe. Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? Let alone "not promoting white men". It's preposterous.
- sanity 9mo ago> Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? For years, many organizations wrongly assumed that anti-discrimination laws didn’t protect white men. Recent Supreme Court rulings—especially Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—have made clear that assumption was false, prompting companies to rapidly rethink or abandon DEI programs.
- rchaud 9mo agowhich organizations were these? Title VII of the Civil Rights Act doesn't carve out any exceptions.
- tbrownaw 9mo agoIt also doesn't allow for the whole affirmative action / disparate impact approach, yet that's how it got applied in practice for quite a while.
- pamcake 9mo agoCool. How many HR departments do you believe had the Civil Rights Act as part of their onboarding in the 80s?
- will4274 9mo agoWell, Harvard for one. They are the one named in the suit. You can also look at the long list of amici briefs and consolidated cases.
- assertion_0xa 9mo agoGoogle is notorious for pulling this and numerous people have come forward pointing it out and the CEO of IBM was on air back in 2021 (?) pointing out that any white men who have a problem with not being promoted can essentially pound sand. This is/was an incredibly common behavior in tech, and anyone who says otherwise is being willfully argumentative or is incredibly isolated.
- lern_too_spel 9mo agoAnecdotally, I have heard the exact opposite. The one thing that is in agreement is that the people promoted in management are uniformly incompetent.
- sanity 9mo agoAny organization with a DEI department, which is most of them. It was pervasive.
- Starman_Jones 9mo agoIn the 80's? In banking? Citation needed.
- j4kp07 9mo ago[dead]
- Auracle 9mo agoThe book that's being referenced?
- Starman_Jones 9mo agoThat would be circular reasoning - we know Adams' claim is true because DEI was pervasive in the 80's, and we know DEI was pervasive in the 80's because Scott Adams said so.
- jojobas 9mo agoTaking being passed for promotion all the way to SCOTUS is a big ask. For decades the default position was the law defends non-white/non-men against white men. In most other western countries you still can put out job ads saying basically "white men need not apply".
- rexpop 9mo agoFor much of history, laws in many countries were designed to uphold systems of privilege for white men. Segregation, discrimination, and unequal treatment were institutionalized, limiting legal protections for non-white individuals and women. I mean, the legal discrimination against people of color throughout history has been accompanied by extreme violence and oppression. It's a brutal legacy that cannot be overstated. Slavery and human trafficking, lynching and extrajudicial killings, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, denial of voting rights, economic exploitation, forced relocation and genocide, invasive medical practices, cultural suppression, and educational disparities... when you whinge about "decades" of legal protections for marginalized identities, I just wonder why you think you're making anywhere close to a salient or meaningful contribution to discussions of justice.
- jojobas 9mo agoThe people who effected slavery and what not are long dead. A poor white boy of today or 30 years ago getting penalized in favor of a black lawyer's daughter achieves nothing in terms of justice.
- Larrikin 9mo agoNearly half of my aunts and uncles saw Martin Luther King Jr speak live on TV. Donald Trump was in college when active discrimination by the government became illegal. Do you think that after Jim Crow was dismantled in the 60s, that all of those people who were against it, that you see in the video footage and photos violently protesting it, suddenly disappeared?
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- kcplate 9mo ago> Why would management even say such a thing and expose themselves to a lawsuit? The 1980s were not the 2020s. I can probably drop a half dozen working anecdotes from that time that would blow your mind…on all sorts of things.
- bahmboo 9mo agoI agree. I was there. There was no DEI and “not promoting white men” was not a thing.
- sanity 9mo agoWhat position were you in that would give you visibility into every manager's office in the country?
- freedomben 9mo agoI'm not disagreeing with you, but this is the exact same argument that some people use to say that racism is no longer an issue. "I've never seen racism"
- kcplate 9mo agoWell, I can’t speak to that with enough confidence to say it was “not a thing”, but I never saw that sort of thing in the eighties. Although, it would not necessarily be unusual for a manager to be that blunt and open at that time without fear of lawsuits, so that part tracks as possibly true for me if there was some sort of effort within his company. However, latter half of the 90s I was in a high enough position in a couple of organizations to experience conversation in management meetings that the hiring of diverse candidates as a preference if possible was often discussed. Although in hindsight you would probably consider it more tokenism than a concerted effort at diversity.
- busyant 9mo agoJust to throw my anecdote in ... In the 1980s, I met a handful of white people (on different occasions) who each complained that they needed a near perfect score on the State Police entrance exam whereas "other" people could be accepted with far lower scores. So, these types of policies did exist at the time. But I'm sure there was a continuum of policies in effect at different institutions in that era. Of course, to me it's perfectly plausible that Adams' boss told him they weren't promoting white men, but largely because I could see the supervisor lying to Adams simply for the purpose of not looking like the bad guy. ("Hey, I wanted to promote you, but you know how the Dems keep meddling in corporate affairs, right? My hands were tied.")
- belorn 9mo agoHow many times have we read about managers that explicitly tells women they won't get promoted because they are expected to get pregnant and later leave? Sometimes the conversation even get recorded on tape. Managers being explicit raciest and sexists are not that uncommon.
- bobdvb 9mo agoMy SIL, this week(!) was told by her supervisor that if she tries to apply for another team and doesn't get that job, she'll be set back in her career progression in her team. Asshole managers are everywhere.
- zzzeek 9mo agoIt's because the boss was lying to him
- s1artibartfast 9mo agoIm not suprised. As recently as 2024, my own fortune 50 company had a policy where manager bonuses were determined POC hiring rates. Ive been told by recruiters that they arent hiring white men in the 2020's. In the 2000's I was also turned down by a fortune 50 defense contractor who said they needed more women to secure better federal contracts.
- listenallyall 9mo agoPeople did all kinds of crazy shit at work (and everywhere else too) in the 80s before everyone lawyered up - guys would literally pinch a girl's ass, people used slurs to each other regularly (and often laughed about it), they smoked and drank all the time. A manager somewhere telling a rejected candidate straight up "sorry man but I've got to hire a <<insert minority>> this time" is not at all difficult to believe.
- bobdvb 9mo agoIt was 1999 I think, I was doing a placement at a media company. One of the PAs was heavily pregnant, an old guy in the office said to her "My my Jane, your breasts are coming along nicely." WTF!