The Eclectic Linda

Tyler Cowen over at Marginal Revolution points to a new book by Lawrence Weinstein and John Adam, Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin.

Cowen asks a sample question: How many people are airborne over the United States at any given moment?

Leaving aside for the moment the obvious fact that it matters whether the moment is mid-morning or middle-of-the night, the first thing that occurred to me was that there were around 6,000 planes in the air when the FAA grounded them on 9/11, so — very roughly — 600,000.

One of the commenters at MR also started with the 9/11 figure, though he recalled it as 4,000. Others explained their estimates reasoning from different assumptions; how many runways active at the several NYC airports, how many daily flights out of Logan airport, how much time does the average American spend in the air in a year?

The thing is, that faced with a blank cocktail napkin, you have to start somewhere, and that means having a mind already well furnished with estimates of other numbers that can be combined to come up with a plausible answer for a novel question.

And it’s not just a parlor game. One of the commenters, giving no rationale, said merely, “10,000.” That isn’t plausible — not if you’ve ever been in a major airport on the day before Thanksgiving, or for that matter ever seen pictures of one on the evening news. People in a democracy are constantly being asked to estimate the plausibility of some policy proposal or other, or to judge the credibility of some politician’s estimates. If they have nowhere to start, their judgment isn’t worth much.

Co-author Weinstein dropped in to the MR comments with a couple of other questions:

How big a landfill would we need to store all our trash for the next century? (And what fraction of the US landmass is that?)

Compare the waste generated per kilometer of horse-drawn carriages and of automobiles.

Cowen says, “This book isn’t for everyone but if you think you might like it you probably will.” Sounds about right.

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation announced earlier this week that Alan Charles Kors, a professor of history at the University of Pennsylvania, would receive one of four 2008 Bradley awards for his work defending students’ right of free expression. (The link doesn’t seem to be working, but a Google cache is here).

I first encountered Kors when I was a grad student at the University of Minnesota, working for the student newspaper, the Minnesota Daily, and was assigned a story about university speech codes (around 1990). Since people in favor of speech codes were thick on the ground, I needed someone who thought they were pernicious, and I called Kors because he was quoted in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

He was extraordinarily gracious to a student journalist calling him out of nowhere, and he was also passionate about the issue. So much so, that even if I hadn’t already agreed with him, I’d likely have been persuaded to change my mind.

I wasn’t surprised when I learned later that he’d emerged as the faculty advocate for a Penn student named Eden Jacobowitz, who was hauled before a kangaroo court for shouting at a noisy gaggle of drunken sorority women outside his dorm in the middle of the night, “Shut up, you water buffalo!”

The women, being black, took this rather improbable insult as racist, although at its source in Hebrew it’s about as racist as “dodo.” Well, I guess “dodo” is more closely African than “water buffalo,” although neither of them is black.

What Kors learned about campus judiciary systems during the water buffalo case eventually impelled him to write a book, The Shadow University, with co-author Harvey Silverglate, about the due-process violations implicit in many campus judiciary systems.

The examples the authors collected during the writing of the book led to the founding of an organization, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (here), dedicated to preserving the rights of students and faculty sucked into the gears of their university’s thought police. FIRE is not, you need to understand, ideological in choosing the people it defends. If the people it defends are more often on the right than the left, as seems to be the case, that is only because the right is mostly where the university thought police seek their victims.

The award is richly deserved (and it’s worth $250,000, which is not too shabby either). The intriguing thing is, why is what Kors has done — following his conscience, and damn the consequences — so rare among academics as to merit a prestigious and lucrative award?

University professors with tenure, after all, enjoy about as much personal and professional security as life affords anyone in this uncertain universe. Are they afraid that if they utter an impious truth, the president won’t invite them for tea again? Sometimes the truth is impious, but must be said.

P.J. O’Rourke gets a whirlwind tour of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt–the “Big Stick”– and writes,

I love big, moving machinery. And machinery doesn’t get any bigger, or more moving, than a U.S.-flagged nuclear-powered aircraft carrier that’s longer than the Empire State Building is tall and possesses four acres of flight deck. This four acres, if it were a nation, would have the fifth or sixth largest airforce in the world–86 fixed wing aircraft plus helicopters.

But more to the point, since P.J. took the trip because he wanted to write about John McCain, he says:

I look from John McCain to what the opposition has to offer. There’s Ms. Smarty-Pantsuit, the Bosnia-Under-Sniper-Fire poster gal, former prominent Washington hostess, and now the JV senator from the state that brought you Eliot Spitzer and Bear Stearns. And there’s the happy-talk boy wonder, the plaster Balthazar in the Cook County political crèche, whose policy pronouncements sound like a walk through Greenwich Village in 1968: “Change, man? Got any spare change? Change?”

He concludes:

A strange flight it is–from the hard and fast reality of a floating island to the fantasy world of American solid ground. In this never-never land a couple of tinhorn Second City shysters–who, put together, don’t have the life experience of the lowest ranking gob-with-a-swab cleaning a head on the Big Stick–presume to run for president of the United States. They’re not just running against the hero John McCain, they’re running against heroism itself and against almost everything about America that ought to be conserved.

(HatTip Instapundit)

Rocky Mountain News columnist Mike Rosen wrote about a few of his pet grammatical peeves last week, and like many people who have never studied linguistics and don’t know what it’s about, he managed to embarrass himself.

Rocky edit page editor Vincent Carroll asked if I wanted to respond, and I did.

For some reason, sportswriters and broadcasters have lately taken (I know, that’s a split infinitive, but I allow myself some of those) to writing or saying, “four RBI,” leaving out the “s.” They may believe they’re being grammatically correct but they’re wrong on two different levels.

Mike Rosen is quite correct (“The trouble with English,” Feb. 1) that there is nothing grammatically incorrect about a “split infinitive,” despite what Mrs. Wellington used to say in my seventh-grade English class, back in the prehistoric era when teachers still believed that it was a good idea for children to be taught the basics of English grammar.

However, the example he generously allows himself, “have lately taken,” is not an infinitive of any kind, just a verb form containing more than one word, and an adverb in its usual and customary place after the first of them.

An infinitive expresses the part of the meaning of a verb that is independent of person, number, gender and tense, as you likely know if there was a Mrs. Wellington in your past. Like “to take,” or “to be,” as infinitives are written in English. In Latin, they’re single words — esse — whence cometh the peculiar idea that they shouldn’t be split in English.

The rest of Rosen’s column illustrates another peculiar phenomenon — that people who know nothing at all about linguistics assume they do because they speak and write a language, and in absence of actual knowledge they just make stuff up.

“The election of the first woman or black president of the United States would surely be an historic event.” No it wouldn’t! But it would certainly be a historic event. Putting history and politics aside, let’s focus on the grammar.

This happens to be one of my pet grammatical peeves. I suspect it’s because people somehow feel “an historic” sounds more elegant than “a historic” that they break a fundamental rule in this case. If you aspirate the “h” at the beginning of a word — that is, if you can hear the “h” — you precede it with the article “a.” If you don’t hear the “h,” you precede it with “an.” So you eat a hot dog or you’re an heir to an estate. You wouldn’t say, “he hit an home run,” so why would you say “it’s an historic event?” (Don’t ask me about “herb;” that’s pronounced both ways.)

There are principles that govern the alternation of “a” and “an,” but they’re phonetic, not grammatical, and not as Rosen describes them. “A hot dog,” but “an uncooked hot dog” and “a delighted heir.”

First, sports jargon is often granted special exemption from the rules of grammar, as in expressions like “he went yard” or “you the man.” It’s a cultural thing.

Granted by whom, hmmm? I’m surprised he didn’t complain about the “passive tense.”

Secondly, “RBI,” in this case, is a compound noun treated as a unitary term. Hence, even though you’d say four “runs batted in” if you spelled out or spoke all the words, when you use the abbreviation as a term, you say four “RBIs.”

I’d probably say “four RBIs,” as Rosen prefers, but whether and where to put the “s” in an acronym is very idiosyncratic, and often different for abbreviations.

Or how about “height” pronounced, “hieth?” The only correct pronunciation is “hite.” Check the dictionary. “Weight” is spelled much the same way and you wouldn’t pronounce it “wayth.” “Height” ends in a “t,” not an “h,” like the word, “length.” It’s not spelled, “heighth.”

Rosen is correct that pronouncing height as “hithe” instead of “hite” is wrong, but so is explaining why by recourse to “weight,” which would argue just as cogently for “hayt.”

Then there’s the annoying use of the word “problematic.” It’s a great word as shorthand for describing some thorny issue or predicament that’s unsettled, uncertain, debatable, indeterminate, baffling or difficult to get your hands around. I don’t like it when broadcasters, reporters or analysts casually use it to describe something that’s merely troublesome or just a run-of-the-mill problem, as in “the snowstorm has made the rush hour drive problematic.”

Stick to politics, Mike. It’s less problematic, because in politics nobody knows what they’re talking about.

Linda Seebach, a former Rocky editorial writer, is a resident of Northfield, Minn.

Predictably, someone in the comments complained about “nobody . . . they”

Posted by Old_Grouch on February 7, 2008 at 6:20 a.m.

“Ms. Seebach might want to look at the principle of grammer that holds a singular noun — “nobody” — takes a singular pronoun — “he”, or “she”, NOT the plural, “they”. However . . . !

“One might ask if anybody at the RMN, really knows what he, or she, is talking about, in or out of ‘politics’.”

I used to write to OG back when I was moonlighting as the letters blog [Hall Monitor], and replied:

Posted by lindaseebach on February 7, 2008 at 10:11 a.m.

@Old_Grouch
As I noted, people who don’t know anything about linguistics often incorrectly believe they do. The so-called “principle of grammer” (sic) that “nobody” is always a singular noun (or “they” always a plural pronoun — it can be analyzed either way) allows for a variety of exceptions, going back to the King James Bible and earlier. See, for example, numerous posts on the linguistics Weblog “Language Log.” *

How would OG complete the tag question, “I guess nobody liked the dessert, did ____?”

And someone else, perhaps mildly irony impaired, informed me:

“Linda,Nobody granted the sports writers an exemption, because there never was a central authority in England to mandate correct grammar and pronunciation, as there was in France and Spain. This situation has led to centuries of bickering. If sports writer jargon is understood and accepted by sports fans, so be it. Just avoid using sports writer jargon in a scholarly article”

People really get into this language stuff.

* See, for instance, Mark Liberman’s post on syntactic and notional number, citing research indicating that pronouns tend to agree with a speaker’s meaning, while verbs are more likely to reflect the form of a noun such as “nobody.”

Michael Graham asks who should be at John McCain’s side come November.

Here’s my three-point test. The VP nominee must:

1-Be perceived as “ready to be president” immediately. One of the major issues of the ‘08 general election will be John McCain’s age. That Washington Post story about McCain being required to get a special life insurance policy will come back in the fall, I guarantee.

2– Add a state to the GOP column. If the GOP has any hope of holding the White House, it will likely involve state by state fighting and getting smart, lucky or both in one or two key states. A Great Lakes state maybe, or Florida. . . .

3–Be a woman or a member of a minority group. It’s tragic but true. 2008 is the year of identity politics. It is dominating the political conversation this year.

To me, #1 and #3 add up to Condoleezza Rice.

She has more foreign policy experience than the two surviving Democrats together. Hillary Clinton’s experience jet-setting around to feel-good conferences as her husband’s stand-in counts for nothing, and Obama knows as much about foreign policy as you would expect from someone who apparently thinks all he needs to know he learned in kindergarten.

None of them has significant executive experience, but Rice was the provost at Stanford, and the Stanford faculty are a lot harder to manage than the hand-picked members of Hillary’s health care task force, and we all know how well that turned out.

Fortunately.

A Republican black probably will not trump a Democratic black, given that blacks are going to vote overwhelmingly for the Democrat anyway, whoever it is. But a black candidate might shift a few of them.

A Republican woman may not trump a Democratic woman, but Rice should be competitive, and there’s the further point that if she runs, win or lose, she’ll be a stronger contender for future presidential nominations.

The Republicans can wait to name their VP candidate at their convention in St. Paul, after the Democratic nominee is chosen, whether at the convention in Denver or before. If Rice were not available, it might be prudent to delay until they know who they’re running against. But there she is. McCain doesn’t need to wait.

(H/T Instapundit)

At Pajamas Media, Los Angeles police officer Jack Dunphy writes about news coverage of violent crime, specifically about the apparently different standards that apply depending on the race and ethnicity of the victims and the alleged perpetrators (hat tip Patterico).

I said in the comments:

Editors consider many factors in judging whether a particular happening is “newsworthy”; for instance, is it something the people who subscribe to newspapers will be interested in reading about? Or perhaps more to the point, is it something advertisers believe the customers they want to reach will be interested in?

Another is how uncommon the occurrence is, whether it’s “man bites dog” (possibly yes) or “dog bites man” (probably no, unless the dog is a pit bull, and the person bitten is a child, or an adult who dies).

But specifically with regard to coverage of murders, it’s a double bind forced on the media by “activists.” If the media give more attention to white victims or killers, they claim it’s because the editors are white racists who think the lives of people of color are less valuable. If the media give equal attention to all murders, then the picketers are out marching with their signs accusing editors of being white racists who want to emphasize everything that’s bad in minority communities.

As long as crime rates are actually different, there’s no way to balance these competing demands for “fairness.”

Earlier I wrote about some of the troublingly counterproductive “diversity training” sessions I’ve been subjected to at several different newspapers in the past 20 years or so. Sometimes this nonsense is forced on media companies by misguided judges, but all too often it is because institutional journalism is mindlessly committed to the absurd proposition that newspapers and other media should “reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.”

“Absurd,” because that phrase is code for “should have the same racial and ethnic percentages as their circulation area.”

Why should that be true of skin-color diversity, when it isn’t true of any other kind of diversity and nobody much cares about the other kinds? Gender, religion (constitutionally protected categories) matter, as well as professionally significant characteristics such as politics, age and education.

And why would anyone expect that it would be true, absent some pretty strenuous social engineering? The relevant demographic facts are the racial diversity not of the community, but of the applicant pool. Since almost everyone working as a journalist has a college degree — though strictly speaking that’s not necessary, any more than it is strictly necessary to graduate from college in order to become a fabulously wealthy CEO like Bill Gates — we should expect that in the absence of discrimination the proportion of minority journalists should be roughly the same as the proportion of minority college graduates, which is 10 percent or so. And it is.

The only way journalism could exceed that proportion is if either its intrinsic appeal or its desirable pay and benefits allowed it to poach applicants in that much sought-after pool from other career tracks. And you can forget the “desirable pay and benefits.” They’re okay, sure, but some way short of competitively “desirable.”

The American Society of Newspaper Editors, however, long ago hitched its wagon to the windmill of proportional community demographics and every year the sails of reality come along and knock it flat.

In its 2006 press release ASNE said,

Without the addition of 11 free dailies, newsroom employment would have slipped by 600 journalists. Thus, paid circulation newspapers have dropped about 2,800 journalists in the past five years as the industry has struggled economically.

Meanwhile the percentage of minorities working in newsrooms crept up from 13.42 to 13.87 percent.

Note those aren’t real numbers, precise to two decimal points; they’re “projections.” ASNE:

For the 2006 ASNE newsroom employment census, 928 of the 1,417 daily newspapers responded to the survey, representing 65.49 percent of all U.S. dailies. The census is based on employment data reported by daily newspapers.

The survey data are projected to reflect all daily newspapers in the country.

ASNE says they have procedures to ensure that minority employment at newspapers that don’t participate in the survey is comparable with minority employment at newspapers “in the same circulation category” that do not participate. I have no reason to doubt that this claim is broadly true, but the circulation categories are themselves rather broad, and there are probably some public-relations issues that play into whether a newspaper reports in a particular year. But when a third of the possible respondents are missing from the data, the distinction between 13.42 and 13.87 is meaningless, and the fact that it was meaningless in the same way last year — “Moreover, because the survey procedures remain constant each year, the ASNE census provides highly reliable year-to-year comparisons” — is really no help.

You need some numbers to anchor all this:

The addition of all free daily general interest newspapers added 11 new newspapers to the survey for a total of 1,417 daily newspapers. Including the free newspapers brings the estimated number of full-time journalists to 54,809. In last year’s census, the newsroom employment number was 54,134. In the 2001 survey, fulltime journalists totaled 56,393.

ASNE’s goal is parity by 2025, but it is falling ever further behind as the country’s minority population, now 33 percent according to the 2000 census, is growing faster than newsrooms can find warm bodies to hire. In a 2005 report they did for the Knight Foundation about employment at the end of 2004, Bill Dedman and Stephen K. Doig point out that even the small percentage gains in recent years result more from the fact that retirements, buyouts and layoffs disproportionately affect older journalists who came into the profession when it was almost entirely white.

ASNE berates itself for failing to meet its own benchmarks.

* The benchmark for percentage of minorities working in newsrooms by this year is 18.55. The actual percentage: 13.87.
* The goal for minority interns is 36.35 percent of the total pool. The actual number: 30.8 percent.
* The goal for minority supervisors is 16 percent. The actual number: 11.2 percent
* The target for the number of newspapers with no minority staffers was to reduce them to 275. The actual number: 377.
* The benchmark for the number of newspapers that have reached parity with their community is 348. The actual number: 145.

Given the demographics of the applicant pool, there is no way to reach these goals, targets and benchmarks except by preferential hiring and promotion policies. It isn’t that white people are being shut out of journalism; obviously, they aren’t, though they may have to accept jobs at smaller papers or wait longer to move up.

Indeed, Jerry Ceppos, then at the San Jose Mercury News and an enthusiastic advocate for this manner of discrimination, admitted as much to one of the journalism magazines some years back. It’s not that minorities are less well qualified than whites, he said, it’s just that on average they have several years less experience.

Why yes. And if they don’t do well competing with colleagues who have years more experience, they often blame the papers that hired them, and they leave for more congenial workplaces.

The target of reducing the number of newspapers with no minority staffers would be a good idea in principle, but the difficulty is that on average they are very small, and bigger papers have both more prestige and usually more money.

“No people of color work in 346 US newspapers, about one in four newsrooms,” Dedman and Doig say, of the newspapers that responded to the ASNE survey. But because so many papers did not respond, their analysis “suggests the likelihood that there are at least 182 more newspapers with all-white newsrooms, for a total of 528 out of 1,410 newspapers, or 37 percent. Together, those newspapers serve more than 5.3 million readers a day.

That is, the average circulation is under 10,000. Exactly eight are more than 30,000. With Gannett, for one, scarfing up more than its share of the available people — “The list is led by companies with well-known programs of rewarding managers — with bonuses — for recruitment of journalists of color,” Dedman and Doig say approvingly — who is left to be hired by, say, the Faribault Daily News?

The authors’ report “includes a separate Web page for each of 1,410 daily newspapers, showing its history of non-white employment from 1990-2005; a Diversity Index comparing the newsroom non-white employment with its circulation area’s population; a companywide Diversity Index; a role model, another newspaper of similar size and circumstance with a higher Diversity Index; and details on the race and ethnicity of the circulation area and the home county. In addition, for the 866 papers that file audited sales reports by ZIP Code, the report shows the racial and ethnic breakdown in each ZIP Code, the household income, and sales per household.”

It’s chilling.

Of course, ASNE is not alone in subscribing to this race-based nonsense. The National Conference of Editorial Writers, to which I belong, sponsors a training program it calls the Minority Writers Seminar, as part of the NCEW Foundation. It’s a 100% quota program — anybody welcome except non-Hispanic whites — held over a spring weekend at Vanderbilt University. They usually have to beat the bushes even to get enough people to fill the slots, but nonetheless they are extremely proud of this good thing they’re doing. And they raise a lot of money to keep doing it.

Nobody seems to notice (well, except for me, doing my usual skunk-at-the-garden-party act) that the clear message of such an activity is that white people can learn to be editorial writers on their own, but everybody else needs help from generous, public-spirited editorial writers, most of whom are white.

The mostly young journalists who show up at for this thing are oblivious to the profound condescension shown them by the organizers, and also to the possible risks to their careers from having it on their resumes. Being a minority journalist is not a disadvantage — to the contrary, in the current climate. Being a journalist who appears to need, or expect, special treatment — that’s a warning signal.

The fallacy at the root of this entire enterprise is that people can write about only themselves and people like them. Journalists of color ought to be in the forefront of those rejecting such a theory of racial essentialism. If they owe their jobs to a pernicious belief, they have no grounds to complain if they’re shunted aside to covering their “communities,” because that’s what they were hired to do.

Economist Tyler Cowen is in Mexico, in San Agustin Oapan, a Nahua town on the Rio Balsas River valley in the State of Guerrero.

He writes,

Thirty-five years ago the trip down to the main road involved an arduous climb and then descent, usually with burro, lasting six to eight hours. Ten years ago the trip down to the main road involved a slow four hour drive (but only 25 km) on a dirt road. Come February, when the paving of the road is finished, it will be a 70-minute drive to the nearest Wal-Mart.

And if you are thinking “Wal-Mart — how degrading” there’s another side to modernization.

There was no rain this summer and hardly any corn was harvested. Forty years ago this would have meant starvation but now it is a mere fluctuation in real incomes. People buy more food from stores, albeit at higher expense. By the way, this is one reason why the Oapan corn farmers do not seem worried about the importation of U.S. corn under NAFTA.

Half the girls now wear jeans instead of dresses. I don’t know about that.

In his book The Undercover Economist, Tim Harford draws an amusing contrast between himself and biologist E.O. Wilson to illustrate the principle of comparative advantage — Wilson may be the better economist, Harford says, but given all the various things they’re good at, it still makes sense for Wilson to write books about biology while Harford sticks to economics.

Perhaps, but it would also make sense for Harford to be a trifle more skeptical about biology. He says:

Reading biologist Edward O. Wilson, I discover that in a few dozen generations all human beings will be “the same,” in the sense that whether in London or Shanghai or Moscow or Lagos, the same racial mix would be found. Viewed differently, the variety of human beings would be unprecedented: as this process of racial mixing accelerates, “many more combinations of skin color, facial features, talents, and other traits influenced by genes are now arising than ever existed before.” (The footnote is to p. 304 of Wilson’s book Consilience.)

Why does Harford endorse the notion that the process of racial mixing is accelerating? It’s trivially true that someone can have children with a person of a different race rather more easily now than was possible when the only way to get from one continent to another was to walk or paddle. But does that mean a whole lot of people are going to do it (relative to the size of the population)? How likely is migration on a scale sufficient to homogenize the populations of Lagos and Shanghai? Or preferential intermarriage with the indigenous population rather than with one’s fellow migrants?

The offhand phrase, “a few dozen generations,” is a sign that the writer really couldn’t be bothered to sketch out a few numbers on the back of an envelope. How long is it? Depending on what the meaning of “a few” or “generation” is, around 1,000 years. That hasn’t been long enough to homogenize Paris and Berlin, let alone Iceland and Greece or Africa and China.

What is accelerating is the rate of human evolution that is driving the continental populations apart faster than migration is blending them back together. There will be many more combinations of traits influenced by genetics, as Wilson says, but the likely outcome will be populations that are more geographically distinctive rather than less so, as Harford assumes.

Hans Bader at openmarket.org, the staff blog for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, has a great post, Diversity Training Backfires, identifying a number of companies that found themselves being sued after they dragooned their unwilling employees into mandatory diversity training re-education sessions, which taught lessons other than the ones intended.

Bader writes:

Diversity training often triggers workplace conflict and lawsuits, by compelling employees to talk about contentious racial or sexual issues, with resulting acrimony, and remarks that are misinterpreted or perceived as racially or sexually biased. For example, in Stender v. Lucky Stores (1992), statements made by managers during sensitivity training were held by a court to be admissible as evidence of discriminatory intent within the organization. That prevented the employer from getting a lawsuit dismissed.

Hattip to Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit, whose link asked, “DOES MANDATORY “DIVERSITY TRAINING” JUST LEAD TO MORE LAWSUITS? I certainly hope so . . .”

Me too. They get what they deserve.

To be fair, employers often have no choice about offering such training and requiring employees to participate. Gail Heriot, a law professor at the University of San Diego and a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, wrote about the sessions she attended on sexual and other workplace harassment, which are mandated by California law.

The villain of the harassment set-piece turns out to be a white guy who is angry about losing a promotion to a black woman, and sets out to harass her into not returning from a pregnancy leave.

This conflates two quite different issues. The harassment itself, as dramatized, is clearly unacceptable and nobody — this is a university workplace, remember — would seriously argue otherwise. But linking it to resentment over affirmative action is purely tendentious. An employee who believes he has been discriminated against — reversely or directly — has a fully protected legal right to complain about it, and the training material strongly suggests the opposite.

Heriot:

The message the employee is supposed to carry away is clear: Anyone who complains about any kind of inappropriate harassment or discrimination in the workplace must be treated with kid gloves (even if the complaint is silly), unless the complainant is a white guy concerned about “reverse” discrimination, in which case he’s “really out of line” and his conduct is “really offensive.”

It occurred to me that this training course is itself a rather blatant form of racial and sexual harassment. Employees taking the course are not so subtly being told, “Do not dream of complaining about race or sex discrimination if you are white or male.”

The question is, why is the training itself so incompetent — when it is is not downright counterproductive?

After years of attending sessions like this, I’ve come to think it’s because the people who seek out careers as diversity trainers are often people who are themselves bigots, and so assume everybody else must be too. Here are some stories about how I arrived at that conclusion.

The Minnesota Daily
The first diversity trainers I had to listen to came to the Minnesota Daily, around 1991. There were two of them, a white woman and a black man, and she treated him as barely more than an animate stage prop for her leading role. It made her preening claim of moral superiority all the harder to take seriously.

It is true that her unwilling audience was entirely white. But that was because our colleagues who were people of color were not required to attend. In fact she could scarcely have conjured up an audience more committed to “diversity” and less troubled by actual diversity. The Daily is an independent student paper, and its hiring policy at the time was in essence to hire every person of color who applied (which was not a large number as we were, after all, in Minnesota), and then complete the staff with the best-qualified white applicants, roughly a third of them. I think I was the only person who thought this was a really bad idea, at any rate the only person who was willing to say so.

The results were absolutely predictable. As the quarter wore on, the two-thirds of affirmative action hires who would never have been on staff if they were white crashed and burned. One quarter we had a Jayson Blair type, whose first story was a blockbuster about discrimination in the graduate program in English, marred only by the fact that the persecuted grad student he wrote about was entirely imaginary.

The paper summarily fired him, and the very next day he walked into a staff job at a large professional paper. I happened to draw the assignment of re-reporting the second story he was working on. This time the people he had quoted in his first draft were real. Only their quotes were fabricated.

Another minority reporter took exception to the way his story was edited, and threw a chair at the chief copy editor. Yet another quit in tears around Thanksgiving because she hadn’t yet finished a second story.

The inevitable effect of this on their white colleagues, most of them undergraduates in their first serious professional workplace, was devastating. They didn’t know about hiring preferences; all they had was the evidence of their own eyes that most of their minority colleagues couldn’t cut it. And the people who suffered the most were those who could, the people of color who would have been hired absent any preferences.

As typical as the trainer’s presentation was, she did come up with one so-far-unmatched idiocy. When she was growing up, she said, there was a lot of hostility between Lutherans and Catholics in her hometown.

Fortunately, she said, that’s no longer so much of a problem. “Nobody takes that religion stuff seriously any more,” she assured us.

Now that’s enlightened tolerance.

Contra Costa Times
Skip forward to a much ballyhooed diversity training session at the Contra Costa Times in California’s East Bay, in 1996 or so, maybe early 1997. (I worked at the Pleasanton office of the Valley Times, one of the CCT’s local editions.) This was a major corporate initiative, we were told, and we would be led down the paths of righteousness by a corporate bigwig from Knight-Ridder, which had recently bought the paper.

Nobody was thrilled about this, but we did understand that if corporate was flying in VIPs to instruct us, we had better pay attention.

In the event, though, the VIP had more pressing duties, and instead we got some hack who informed us that she had been a diversity consultant for 10 years and assured us that she would be teaching us how to be comfortable around people “who were different from us.”

Granted, she couldn’t win. First strike was what she wasn’t: important. Second was what she was: a hired gun for a disreputable enterprise. And third was what she said. Apparently unaware that just about everybody within sound of her voice was a lot more comfortable with diversity than she was, she proceeded to fling about stereotypes that would have gotten any of us fired.

For example, she said that putting together the first Unity conference was extremely difficult, because the Hispanic journalists’ group operated on “Mexican time.” (For those of you who don’t know about Unity, it’s a loose confederation of four ethnically separatist journalism groups who put on solidarity conventions whose main purpose is to charge exorbitant prices for recruiting booths so the employers can prove to any meddling federal bureaucrats who come snooping that they have indeed attempted to recruit underrepresented minorities. It’s a hustle.)

She’d been parachuted in from somewhere, maybe Miami, and evidently hadn’t given any thought to where she was. So when someone asked her about how gay and lesbian issues would be dealt with, she drew in a breath with that telltale hissing noise that means the speaker is discomfited. “That’s very difficult,” she said, adding that many companies didn’t cover it at all in their diversity training.

Remember, I said “East Bay.” This meeting was being held in Walnut Creek, which is maybe 30 minutes by BART from the Castro. I doubt that anyone present was troubled by that.

Rocky Mountain News
Rocky employees were required to attend diversity training sessions as a result of a court decision in a discrimination case which it had lost or settled, I forget which. The employee who brought the case had not worked in the newsroom, but in another division which by this time belonged to a different company. So there was considerable resentment that we, who had nothing to do with the employee or the case, were sentenced to collective punishment.

One of the trainers was a white woman in a bright pink suit, whom everyone afterward called “the Pink Nazi.” Her colleague was a black woman whose contribution to the session was to demonstrate how costly insensitivity was to a company, which she did by gloating about how much money she got in a successful discrimination suit.

Her other role was as a prop for the Pink Nazi, who demonstrated how not to behave by directing a stream of abuse toward her, including a prominent use of the n-word.

I’ve been working since 1957, and I had never before heard the n-word used in the workplace. (And exactly twice outside it.) What was this performance supposed to teach us? That it is acceptable to use racial slurs to abuse a black woman in public if you have a pure heart and lofty purposes?

The Pink Nazi also showed a couple of cringe-inducing videos, one of an outside salesman hitting on a secretary (unintended message, “anything short of this is permitted”) and another of a mildly effete young man being hassled by male co-workers who thought he was gay. At least I think that was the point; the Pink Nazi seemed to think it was an example of same-sex sexual harassment.

As Bader points out, relying on diversity consultants for legal advice is perilous.

How anyone can believe these heavy-handed attempts at indoctrination can improve workplace harmony entirely escapes me.