To help understand the latest Becky Bashing in which a non-black woman riding on the DC Metro had distribution of her upcoming novel yanked because she dared to Police a Black Body by reporting a black female Metro employee for violating a Metro rule, here’s an article from the Washington Times in 2012 on why the DC Metro system is such a mess:
“Metro derailed by culture of complacence, incompetence, lack of diversity”
Note that the conservative Washington Times is using “lack of diversity” in the technically accurate sense of 97% of Metro bus and train operators being of one race so that’s not diversity, not in the contemporary American sense in which blacks=diversity=Our Strength.
Ninety-seven percent of the bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black, with only six white women out of more than 3,000 drivers, according to Metro documents — a lack of diversity at one of the region’s largest employers that has led to an acknowledgment of failure in affirmative-action documents and spawned a series of lawsuits.
The homogeneity, interviews with dozens of current and former Metro workers indicated, is a proxy to a clubby culture of favoritism in which merit has little to do with promotions, and accountability, such as noting safety violations, is a career death knell. In typical examples, court and Metro records show, a black man who spent eight years in prison for dealing PCP was promoted to a high-level management position soon after his release, and whites in the same positions as blacks with far less seniority are inexplicably paid less.
With Metro’s budget chronically strained and reports of mismanagement coming more regularly than trains, interviews and internal records depict a likely root: an environment in which hardworking employees are actively excluded and those who rise are those willing to do the bare minimum — never causing a stir by flagging rampant safety violations, reporting malfeasance or proposing improvements.
“When the accident happened in 2009, I called a supervisor and said, ‘Is this the one we all dreaded?’ The way workers do their jobs, we all knew it was a matter of time. … The inept get promoted, and the capable get buried. Smart people were put in the corner, ostracized and given nothing to do,” said Christine Townsend, who sued Metro for discrimination and won.
It is a culture in which a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate, multiple staffers said…
Metro’s affirmative-action plan notes that the 1.4 percent of its bus and train operators who are Hispanic and the 25 percent who are female of any race are “less than reasonably expected.” It does not make note of the 1.5 percent who are white.
Even in entry-level occupations typically dominated by Hispanics, there are virtually none at Metro. Only one laborer out of 67 is Hispanic; of 540 landscapers, carpenters and cleaners, only 22 are Hispanic. In the national capital region, Hispanics make up 13 percent of adults and blacks comprise 25 percent; white women constitute 29 percent.
“The odds of such a disparity occurring by chance are statistically infinitesimal,” Ronald A. Schmidt, a lawyer representing 12 white women exploring a class-action lawsuit, wrote in a 2003 letter. “There appears to be an entrenched network of African-American employees at WMATA that is able to steer jobs, promotion, training and other career enhancing benefit to persons of their own racial or ethnic group.”
Blacks occupy a lot of valuable turf in D.C., both geographic and institutional.
From Wikipedia:
The Plan is a conspiracy theory in Washington, D.C. that since the District of Columbia Home Rule Act in 1973, white people have had a “plan to take back” the black-majority city and the offices of the local government.[1][2] The theory asserts that the decline of low-income black residents and their replacement by wealthier whites from outside of Washington, D.C. is intentional through the calculated use of gentrification and urban renewal.[3] The Plan is generally regarded as false within Washington, D.C., while some believe it has quiet but considerable support among black residents and influences local elections.[4]
