Good comes to everyone when everyone participates in our shared life

By Herbert Rothschild

Opponents of affirmative action programs — mostly white males — regarded them simply as an (unwarranted) benefit to women and people of color. They aren’t willing to acknowledge that they themselves are the beneficiaries of a thoroughgoing affirmative action program for white males that prevailed from the founding of our country into the 1960s and beyond.

That is a moral failure. The practical failure is their unwillingness to acknowledge the benefits we all derive by including our entire population in every facet of our common life.

Those of us who worked in academia during the years when college faculties were diversified by gender, race and ethnicity witnessed the expansion of our fields and the resulting increase of our knowledge. The subject matters of historical and literary studies were especially broadened. Fields like colonial and postcolonial history, essential to understanding our world, entered the curriculum. Wonderful but long-neglected texts became staples of course syllabi.

It wasn’t just an expansion of what was considered worth studying that changed, however. Teachers and scholars with very different experiences and perspectives prompted a reexamination of familiar subject matter, challenging settled interpretations and judgments. Beyond that, there was a new appreciation — elaborated in critical theories — of how dependent upon the life situation of the observer our understandings can be.

Two recent developments prompted me to recall my professional experience with affirmative action. One is the U.S. Supreme Court’s series of rulings rejecting affirmative action and, consequently, recent legal pressure on corporations to discontinue their diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs. The other is the impact on the Department of the Interior by Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous person to serve as its secretary.

Regarding DEI, many large corporations began such programs in the 1990s and early 2000s in response to successful discrimination suits by their employees. For instance, Smith Barney paid more than $100 million to settle a sex discrimination claim. In 2007, Morgan Stanley paid $46 million and, in 2013, Bank of America Merrill Lynch (now Bank of America and BofA Securities) paid $160 million to settle race discrimination suits. When I began courting Deborah in 1999, she was working in the Diversity Center of Shell Oil in Houston, which had been established as part of a large settlement.

Now, the legal pendulum has swung the other way. America First Legal, founded by former Trump senior aide Stephen Miller, has been suing corporations for discrimination against white males. Given the legal pressure and attacks by Republican legislators, corporations are pulling back. In an interview with Axios in January, Johnny Taylor, president of the Society for Human Resource Management, said, “The backlash is real. And I mean, in ways that I’ve actually never seen it before. CEOs are literally putting the brakes on this DE&I work.”

Although some corporations are pleased to be rid of the mechanics of DEI programs, such as sensitivity training and employee resource groups, many came to realize that they had tapped into pools of talent that enhanced their businesses. While avoiding the use of the term DEI in reports to shareholders, they have continued them.

A heralded case in point is JPMorgan Chase, the largest financial institutional in the world. In his 2020 shareholder letter, CEO Jamie Dimon dwelt on Chase’s DEI efforts. In his shareholder letter this April, Dimon didn’t use the DEI abbreviation. Still, he talked about Chase’s continued commitment to the work, saying it’s good for business. “Reaching more communities, for example, means growing the customer base. Casting a wider net to find talent means you’re finding the best people. Helping entrepreneurs succeed is a way of creating more business for the bank down the line.”

In our country, the pool of potential white male employees is shrinking. In 2020, white males constituted about 30% of the population. Even more relevant to employers is that white males are rapidly aging out of the workforce. In 2019, the average age of all whites in the U.S. was 57. By contrast, the average age of Asians was 29, of Black people was 27, and of Hispanics was 11. Politics can’t alter the long-term economic implications of these irreversible trends.

Now to the other recent development that brought to my mind the general benefits of DEI. On April 18, the Department of the Interior finalized a proposed rule putting conservation on an equal footing with drilling, grazing and other uses of U.S.-owned lands. Private industry and the Republican governors of South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Utah and Nevada inveighed against the ruling, and GOP members of Congress said they will seek to invalidate it.

The rule will allow public property to be leased for restoration in the same way that oil companies lease land for drilling. It also promotes the designation of more “areas of critical environmental concern” — a special status that can restrict development. That designation is given to land with historic or cultural significance (including to Native American tribes) or to land important for wildlife conservation.

Interior’s Bureau of Land Management oversees some 380,000 square miles of surface land, primarily in the West. Additionally, Interior controls vast underground mineral reserves, including those under 2.5 billion acres on the outer continental shelves.  Historically, the department has allowed private interests — ranchers, loggers, drillers and miners — to exploit these public resources at below-market costs. Its ethos has been the Western one of material exploitation.

Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, brought to Interior a different ethos. In an extensive profile published in the May 6 issue of The New Yorker, Haaland told its author, “You know, when I think about why I am really here, it’s like I’m here because the ancestors felt it was necessary. I can’t explain it any other way.”

Given the desperate condition of Planet Earth, that sense of connection across generations could not be more timely. At its heart is humility, a deeply felt sense that we are simply a part of a reality much larger than our individual identities. As with so many other obstacles to creating a just and joyful world, white entitlement is a failure of humility.  

Herbert Rothschild’s columns appear on Friday in Ashland.news. Email Rothschild at [email protected].