Roger Clegg sends the following:
The Washington Post’s weekly “Capital Business” supplement focuses on diversity this issue, and there’s all the usual corporate bean-counting nonsense. But the prize goes to the hotel industry. Marriott had “a goal of getting 500 hotels in the hands of diverse owners by 2010,” which was merely “part of a larger diversity agenda that included a pledge to spend $1 billion with minority suppliers….” Choice Hotels “provides up to $125,000 to developers that are more than 51 percent owned by minorities.” And the prize for blatancy goes to Hilton, which “has an incentive program, in which its sales team members receive a bonus for securing qualified minority owners.”
It would be nice if the “hospitality” honchos would explain why they are so inhospitable to racial equality, and why they think they are exempt from the duty imposed on them by various civil rights laws not to put their corporate thumb on the racial scales when dealing with applicants, employees, contractors, franchisees, etc.
I would also love to hear J.W. Marriott, Jr., try to explain just how one owner can be “diverse,” or for that matter what makes a bunch of blacks “diverse.” I doubt that he would get much help from Ray Bennett, his senior vice president for lodging development, whose own attempt nicely reveals the corporate mind (if you’ll excuse the oxymoron) struggling in vain for coherence. “When you look at our ownership base, workforce, and suppliers,” Bennet pontificated, “diversity permeates throughout.”
If that’s really the case, of course, it should no longer be necessary to continue discriminating against all the un-diverse workers, suppliers, and would-be owners to produce … what? more permeation?
