By Don Feder, Creators Syndicate, Inc.

May 1994 –White, Male, And Worried” is the cover story in the current issue of Business Week. Given corporate America’s latest obsession, there is cause for concern.

Quota hiring and promotion apparently aren’t enough. The execrable white male must be hectored, humiliated and re-educated. “Managing diversity,” they call it.

More than half the work force now consists of women, non-whites and the foreign-born, diversity mavens repeat mantra-fashion. To derive maximum benefit from this work force, businesses must learn to “value” differences among their employees.

Mobile, Apple Computer, Xerox, Digital Equipment, and Proctor and Gamble all are major players in the diversity game. AT&T celebrates everything from Asian Pacific American Heritage Month to Gay Pride Week.

Diversity training (an estimated 40% of businesses have it in some form) is based on the premise that blacks, women, Hispanics and Asians have group identities. Each has certain cultural attitudes at variance with those of the “white, male ethic.” “You don’t manage everyone the same, you manage everyone fairly,” says Apple’s Santiago Rodriguez.

Enter diversity trainers, ready to fight entrenched biases for fat fees. A contract with one consulting firm costs $500,000 for the first year of a three-to-five-year commitment.

Diversity dogma would have it both ways. While insisting that we not make assumptions, it makes assumptions. Demanding that we reject stereotypes, it posits its own.

Thus, Hispanics “humanize” a business environment. Asians defer to authority and so avoid saying “no” outright. Women are more intuitive and empathic. And so on.

Sensitivity to minority concerns includes an examination of past injustices, which –naturally – necessitates consideration of how the system worked to the advantage of white males (treated as a fungible commodity).

Ken Richardson, a WM who was made to endure a week of diversity defamation in 1992, told Business Week he was blamed “for everything from slavery to the glass ceiling.” The white female and black male instructors seemed to “feed into the white-male-bashing.” Richardson confesses: “I became bitter and remain so.”

Diversity doyenne Judith Katz, quoted in the Washington City Paper, insists, “Whites need to be re-educated.” The problem, Katz comments, is that “White people do not see themselves as White (shocking!). This is a way of perpetuating the racist system and being part of the problem.”

Another consultant involved uses a handout that lists right and wrong attitudes for trainees. Wrong: “I deny being White and do not see my whiteness supporting racism.” Right: “I own the positive parts of being White and accept the reality of parts of my whiteness supporting racism.”

One imagines a group of corporate execs, in Brooks Brothers suits instead of Mao jackets, sitting in a circle, chanting: “I confess my corrupt role in oppressing the masses and only wish I could die for the revolution to atone for my sins.”

AT&T leads the way
The most daring dimension of diversity indoctrination is appreciation of homosexuality. In this regard, AT&T is the leader. “Gay rights is the issue of the ’90s, just as civil rights was the issue of the ’60s and women’s rights the issue of the ’70s,” says an AT&T spokesman.

The communications conglomerate conducts “Homophobia In The Workplace” training sessions, designed to expose “examples of homophobic behaviors which affect productivity” and present “accurate information” on the lifestyle.

The “accurate information” comes directly from the canon of the gay rights movement. Workshops are taught by homosexual consultant Brian McNaught. A reader whose husband was subjected to the Pavlovian procedure told me McNaught spent much of the eight-hour session describing how he’s suffered at the hands of the Roman Catholic Church.

Be assured that the Church, the Orthodox rabbinate and the pro-family movement aren’t invited in to present their perspective, even though the public, by sizable majorities, agrees with them.

Similarly, when the AT&T facility in North Andover, Massachusetts, celebrates Women’s Awareness Month, it’s with the National Organization for Women and Planned Parenthood, not Concerned Women for America.

It may not have dawned on business leaders that employees didn’t go to work for them with the expectation of being scapegoated and having their psyches probed and their values derided.

Regarding inherent differences, the sole concern of managers should be enforcing civility (which could be accomplished by a simple memo annotating behavior that will not be tolerated). Attempts at indoctrination invariably provoke backlashes.

Political correctness is no longer confined to the college campus. Corporate America has joined the ranks of the nation’s thought police, wielding a nightstick called diversity training. If you work for a corporation and haven’t as yet felt its bone-crushing blows on your cranium, you soon will.