Like the freaks at an old time carnival and the live eel-eating geek, this is a pretty disgusting display. The manager of an intern program for a “major global institution” asks permission from the New York Times Magazine’s advice columnist “The Ethicist” to offer full time positions based on race rather than performance. Of course, the manager never says “race,” what he says is that although the “more privileged” interns “appear to be” performing at a higher level than those “who come from less privileged backgrounds,” he wants ethical leave to make the final hiring decisions by “taking personal life circumstances” into consideration. In other words, he wants to discriminate against the white interns.
The euphemisms are so thick you best use a trowel to read the query, but NYU ethics professor Kwame Anthony Appiah not only follows his lead but also (predictably) goes to great lengths to rationalize what is an obvious appeal to DEI ideology. Permit me to dissect The Ethicist’s intellectual dishonest double-talk; this time I’ll have The Ethicist’s words in italics and mine in regular text:
We live in a class society.
Objection! “Class society” suggests that this is a formal, enforced system like India or Great Britain. The only classless societies, theoretically, are ideally-functioning communist societies, which don’t exist. The Ethicist exposes his bias immediately.
People who are rich in financial terms tend to be rich in cultural and social capital too: They have social assets, resources and connections. All these forms of advantage can contribute to an employee’s actual performance.
Appiah is assuming cause and effect when the distinction is unknowable. Families that make an effort to create social assets, cultural awareness and beneficial connections for their children tend to raise more successful children. Rich people don’t all become rich because riches have been providentially bestowed on them, but this is how The Ethicist frames the issue. After all, Karl Marx says it is so.
But they can also contribute to the employee’s perceived performance. People often make judgments about the intelligence of speakers on the basis of their accents, for example, and one form of cultural capital is having the accent of the white, educated, Northern-coastal, middle classes. So you can ask yourself whether your judgment about which of these interns is doing best has been shaped by features that don’t reflect the contribution they’re likely to make. You’re obviously alert to this possibility, because you write that the more privileged interns “appear” to be performing better; it’s worth thinking about whether you can identify evaluative measures that are less subject to this kind of bias.
Nice try. Because the inquirer used the equivocal “appear,” The Ethicist leaps to the conclusion that the real meaning was “the whte interns may not be as good as their performance indicates.” His bias is palpable. In jobs requiring communication, for example, clear and understandable speech is a significant asset, and legitimately so. Anyone seeking to rise in business who hasn’t dealt with the problem of an accent handicap has demonstrated a significant lack of industry and responsibility. Appiah just brushes away the importance of being able to be understood as a mirage. Baloney! Learn to speak clearly and well. If speaking clearly and well means learning to sound like a white, educated, Northern-coastal, middle classes individual, then do it. If you want to keep sounding like Snoop Dogg on principle, swell, but don’t come around whining about prejudice when you can’t get the jobs you want.
Ethics Alarms 