16346: Quotas & Affirmative Action For The Privileged…?

 

This ain’t a new rant, but it’s always worth repeating.

 

Harvard Business Review published a report titled, “How to Effectively—and Legally—Use Racial Data for DEI,” which included the following two paragraphs:

 

To understand how to best act on this complex topic, it’s important to start with the legal foundations. According to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, it’s illegal to consider any single candidate’s or employee’s race—even with the intention of creating a more diverse, equitable, or inclusive workforce—in any employment decision. Employers can’t create de facto hiring quotas (e.g., “50% of the employees hired in this department must be women”), or “reserve seats” for employees from certain groups, even in the interest of diversity.

 

According to the law, even after the recent Supreme Court ruling, gender-conscious or race-conscious hiring practices are permitted, but only as part of limited, temporary, and highly structured voluntary affirmative action programs, undertaken only if employers find evidence of company-wide or industry-wide hiring discrimination, only to correct the initial imbalance, and only without “undue harm” on members of non-targeted groups (meaning that employers cannot lay off white workers to hire workers of color).

 

The paragraphs explain recent maneuvers in Adland—as well as underscore the systemic racism so prevalent in the field.

 

In 2016, Omnicom President-CEO-Pioneer of Diversity John Wren vowed to double the number of female creative leaders at BBDO within the calendar year. In 2018, Ogilvy publicly declared that 20 women would be hired into creative leadership roles by 2020. In short, White advertising agencies took advantage of legal loopholes to promote White women via voluntary affirmative action programs.

 

Yet despite generating heat shields and performative PR in response to George Floyd’s murder and the Black Lives Matter movement, White ad agencies have not even suggested implementing quotas to increase Black representation. Affirmative action is deemed reverse discrimination. No one has openly pursued the processes proffered by Elizabeth (Dori) Tunstall, executing cluster hires to correct the fully acknowledged imbalances.

 

In Adland, quotas and affirmative action are exclusively presented by the privileged—without question or hesitation—to the privileged. It’s systemic racism positioned as progress.