Filed under: News, Politics, Race and Civil Rights
South Africa's Dudu Tshabalala was the first black woman to make it to L'Oreal's executive committee. She was climbing the corporate ladder quickly, making her way straight to the top. As a manager in the diversity group, she even represented the company at key events.
But the once-high flying executive now says that she is being ostracized for speaking up against racial injustices. She said that L'Oreal fudged the books by stating that it has 30 senior black "legislators" when there are only four. Tshabalala's court papers claim that the company is being "economical with the truth" in official reports.
Much of the target of Tshabalala's disdain is Phillipe Raffray, the company's managing director. He's the one who is allegedly working to have Tshabalala removed from the company after declaring that the working situation was untenable. After Tshabalala made her claim that the company was fabricating the numbers deliberately, the total in the official report was reduced from 30 to four. Tshabalala has also filed suit to get her job back.
Although Tshabalala's case takes place in another country, this kind of behavior is all too common in corporations and other institutions around the world, including the United States. I've seen universities tell significant fibs about the numbers of minority faculty on campus or try to manipulate the numbers in ways that put them in a favorable light. Here are some tricks I've seen played on college campuses (I won't say which one):
1) Using the general term of "minority" to include anyone who is not white in their total. So, if you have a lot of Asians or Indians on campus that is counted the same as underrepresented minorities.
2) Claiming that it is impossible to keep track of the number of black professors on campus, although they can find a way to keep up with every other statistic imaginable. So when someone asks for the data, they can almost legitimately claim that they don't have it.
3) Focusing on the number of black students they have rather than the number of black professors, knowing full well that students are only on campus for four years, while faculty have real power and require a much greater investment.
4) Adding the numbers of visiting and adjunct professors. This tactic was used exhaustively by Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan to justify her disgraceful hiring record at Harvard Law School. In her discriminatory behavior, Kagan was simply maintaining a strong Harvard tradition of excluding black law professors from their campus. (Harvard just recently gave tenure to only the second black female law professor in its nearly 200-year history.) Most faculty know, however, that being tenured versus visiting a campus is like the difference between marrying someone and having sex with them for a year.
5) Including every black person you can find in your statistics, no matter where they are from. Therefore, any black person from Africa, Cuba or anywhere else is used to pad the total.
There's a long list of tricks used in corporations, universities and other places to tell big, blatant lies about institutionalized racism. Many American organizations have a history of exclusion, since African Americans and other underrepresented minorities were not invited to the table when these institutions were founded. Therefore, years later, these organizations are dominated and run by whites, many of whom may refuse to adjust their policies to allow others to be a part of the establishment. Rather than doing the hard work to become truly diverse and directly confront racism of the past, many institutions choose to perpetuate historical racism by holding tight to racially divisive ways of doing business.
What's also consistently true when it comes to this story and others like it is that people of color who speak out against racism are punished for doing so. Additionally, many organizations add insult to injury by claiming that they are unsuccessfully searching high and low to find qualified minorities.
Such statements are glaring reflections of white supremacy, mainly because they are forgetting that the criteria used to decide who is qualified is based on a white supremacist foundation. So when thousands of highly qualified black scholars apply for positions at major universities, the faculty almost always chooses to nitpick their way in finding a reason that the person is not qualified. In other words, they become like Republicans in Congress who claim they want to get bills passed but find a reason that every bill they see is simply not good enough.
Perhaps it's time for the games to end and for people to be honest about diversity. At the very least, I am hopeful that some of the tricks and tactics I've listed above can be helpful to those who wish to push their organizations to a higher standard. They may get angry at you for making them do the right thing today, but remember that they also hated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. Boyce Watkins is the founder of the Your Black World Coalition and a Scholarship in Action resident of the Institute for Black Public Policy. To have Dr. Boyce's commentary delivered to your e-mail, please click here.