A Horrible Diversity Gap In Washington State

The Associated Press recently exposed a horrible, shocking diversity gap in Washington state government. “Racial and ethnic minorities now account for more than one-quarter of Washington state residents,” the article pointed out accusingly, but only “18 percent of state employees as a whole are minorities, according to an AP analysis of state personnel records, and there’s even less diversity among managers — only 16 percent of them are nonwhite.”

It’s a good thing no one believes in quotas, or Washington state officials would have outraged journalists pointing fingers at them. Oh, wait….

Responding to that article, Jerry Large, a Seattle Times reporter who writes frequently about race, looked at “the state of race” in the state and concluded that “Something is monkeying with the machinery of racial equality.”

He noticed, for example:

Washington state began a push for greater diversity in government in the 1960s with an affirmative-action program. Businesses and governments around the country did the same.

Thirty years later, The Seattle Times ran a package of stories about the progress, which was pretty limited. In fact the analysis found that in one of the key affirmative-action programs, half the people hired were white.

Imagine that! What a mess! Something must really be “monkeying with the machinery of racial equality” if all or nearly all the people hired in even “one of the key affirmative-action programs” weren’t black or Latino….