Just the same old you-will-sit-down-shut-up-and-get-your-mind-right agenda dressed up as modern organizational planning practices

I just  read a piece by John Rice, who heads an outfit called Management Leadership for Tomorrow in The Atlantic, and it's insidious as hell. Take the title, "The Difference Between First-Degree Racism and Third-Degree Racism." What a way to frame things. The first hints of where he's going already waft off his article.

His second paragraph recounts the undeniably impressive arc of his father's life:

My father, Emmett Rice, and I had hundreds of conversations about race and racism from the time I was a boy until a few weeks before he died, in 2011, at 91 years old. He was the most intellectually curious person I have ever known. He grew up in South Carolina in the Jim Crow era of the 1920s and ’30s. Despite losing his father when he was only 7, he graduated from college, served in World War II with the Tuskegee Airmen, earned a doctorate in economics, and became one of the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board in the 1980s. 

He concludes the paragraph by saying, "Racism chased him and burdened him every day of his life." Come on. Even after he'd become a Federal Reserve Governor? Raw racism?

Well, you see, there are degrees of racism.

Back to that in a moment. Rice mentions his father in order to formulate a cost-benefit model:

Thirty years ago, my dad gave me his playbook to put racism to rest, and it inspired me to dedicate my career to executing his vision. Dad’s playbook included one insight that all Americans should hear, at least those who hope that when it comes to addressing racism, we can do better. As an economist, he told me that we have to “increase the cost of racist behavior.” Doing so, he said, would create the conditions for black people to harness the economic power essential to changing the narrative in white America’s mind about race.

That, in Rice's construct, necessitates a quantifiable metric for determining how racist an organization is:

We can ratchet up that cost in several ways, starting today. The first step is to clarify what constitutes racist behavior. Defining it makes denying it or calling it something else that much harder. There are few things that white Americans fear more than being exposed as racist, especially when their white peers can’t afford to come to their defense. To be outed as a racist is to be convicted of America’s highest moral crime. Once we align on what racist behavior looks like, we can make those behaviors costly.

The most well-understood dimension involves taking actions that people of color view as overtly prejudiced—policing black citizens much differently than whites, calling the police on a black bird-watcher in Central Park who is asking you to obey the law, calling somebody the N-word to show them who is boss. This is racism in the first degree. If officers anticipated that they would be held fully accountable for bad policing, they would do more good policing and we could begin healing the wounds they’ve inflicted on black people for centuries. 

Then he gets to his second degree, and brings in Colin Kaepernick - he of the Che Guevara tee shirt, Castro cap and socks depicting law enforcement officers as actual pigs. That's not a trivial or irrelevant aspect of who Kaepernick is. It ought to me mentioned when Kaepernick is brought into a discussion.

Then, in the course of depicting the third degree in his formulation, he engages in some irony that one wonders if he's aware of. He insists on quantifiable data regarding diversity within a corporation, but then makes the sweeping generalization that some people - who happen to be black - that are perceived to be work harder actually don't:

The final, most pernicious category undergirds the everyday black experience. When employers, educational institutions, and governmental entities do not unwind practices that disadvantage people of color in the competition with whites for economic and career mobility, that is fundamentally racist—not to mention cancerous to our economy and inconsistent with the American dream. For example, the majority of white executives operate as if there is a tension between increasing racial diversity and maintaining the excellence-based “meritocracies” that have made their organizations successful. After all, who in their right mind would argue against the concept of meritocracy?

When these executives are challenged on hiring practices, their first excuse is always “The pipeline of qualified candidates is too small, so we can only do so much right now.” Over the past 20 years, I have not once heard an executive follow up the “pipeline is too small” defense with a quantitative analysis of that pipeline. This argument is lazy and inaccurate, and it attempts to shift the responsibility to fix an institution’s problem onto black people and the organizations working to advance people of color. When asked why they have so few minorities in senior leadership roles, executives’ most common response is “There are challenges with performance and retention.” To reinforce their meritocracy narrative, white leaders point to the few black people they know who have made it to the top, concluding inaccurately that they were smarter and worked harder than the rest.

Then he makes the assumption that black people within an organization have their focus compromised with a tangle of head trips about how they're perceived and even how they perceive themselves:

Organizations cannot be meritocracies if their small number of black employees spend a third of their mental bandwidth in every meeting of every day distracted by questions of race and outcomes. Why are there not more people like me? Am I being treated differently? Do my white colleagues view me as less capable? Am I actually less capable? Will my mistakes reflect negatively on other black people in my firm? These questions detract from our energy to compete for promotions with white peers who have never spent a moment distracted in this way. I wager that 90 percent of the white executives who read these last sentences are now asking, particularly after recent events, “How did we miss that?” This dimension of racism is particularly hard to root out, because many of our most enlightened white leaders do not even realize what they are doing. This is racism in the third degree, akin to involuntary manslaughter: We are not trying to hurt anyone, but we create the conditions that shatter somebody else’s future aspirations. Eliminating third-degree racism is the catalyst to expanding economic power for people of color, so it merits focus at the most senior levels of education, government, and business.

That's nothing short of an insult to millions of Americans who happen to be black. Are they not individuals with particular thought processes that may or may not include race considerations? It's quite an assumption to be making to say that they all have race at the forefront of their approach to their work. Why would we not find the same range of approaches that we would with any other demographic classification?

Now we get to the meat of what he's after. The same coercive impetus one finds in any leftist enterprise is on full display here:

Employers whose efforts to increase diversity lack the same analytical and executional rigor that is taken for granted in every other part of their business engage in practices that disadvantage black people in the competition for economic opportunity. By default, this behavior protects white people’s positions of power. The nonprofit organization that I have built over the past 20 years, Management Leadership for Tomorrow, has advanced more than 8,000 students and professionals of color toward leadership positions, and we partner with more than 120 of the most aspirational employers to support their diversity strategy, as well as their recruiting and advancement efforts. Yet I have not seen 10 diversity plans that have the foundational elements that organizations require everywhere else: a fact-based diagnosis of the underlying problems, quantifiable goals, prioritized areas for investment, interim progress metrics, and clear accountability for execution. Expanding diversity is not what compromises excellence; instead, it is our current approach to diversity that compromises excellence and becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

We can increase the cost of this behavior by calling on major employers to sign on to basic practices that demonstrate that black lives matter to them. These include: (1) acknowledging what constitutes third-degree racism so there is no hiding behind a lack of understanding or fuzzy math, (2) committing to developing and executing diversity plans that meet a carefully considered and externally defined standard of rigor, and (3) delivering outcomes in which the people of color have the same opportunities to advance.

Companies that sign on will be recognized and celebrated. Senior management teams that decline to take these basic steps will no longer be able to hide, and they will struggle to recruit and retain top talent of all colors who will prefer firms that have signed on. The economic and reputational costs will increase enough for behavior and rhetoric to change. Then more people of color will become economically mobile, organizations will become more diverse and competitive, and there will be a critical mass of black leaders whose institutional influence leads to more racially equitable behavior. These leaders will also have the economic power to further elevate the cost of all other types of racist behavior, in policing, criminal justice, housing, K–12 education, and health care—systems that for decades have been putting knees on the necks of our most vulnerable citizens and communities.

You'll be recognized and celebrated if you get with the program and there will be nowhere for you to hide if you don't.

Look, Mr. Rice, a company that, say, makes widgets or sells hamburgers or provides engineering services to oil fields or engages in investment banking is focused on delivering that product, and appropriately so. Requirements for the particular functions needed to profitably deliver that product are colorblind. I'll bet your dad knew that.

Not only does this kind of mischief get us further away from people seeing themselves and each other as individuals with the full range of traits found in human beings generally, it is rather explicitly anti-free-market. Rice would have some kind of entity - his firm, I suppose - come into privately owned organizations and preform inspections, like some government agency such as OSHA.

Because race is a perennially sensitive subject in our society and the climate is particularly raw at the moment, it becomes a cudgel by which the Great Dismantling Project can make big strides toward obliterating a private realm within our society.

You will not be permitted to actually own anything, such as a business. You won't even be able to own the thoughts inside your head. They will become the property of the collective, and you will make them available for scrutiny on demand.

That's exactly what Mr. Rice's bottom line is.