Myron Magnet On Affirmative Action: “Every One Of Them Has Turned Out To Be An Empty Suit”
12/01/2017
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In his November Diary, John Derbyshire mentions Gene Dattel’s new book, Reckoning with Race: America’s Failure,and suggests that
you may want to read Myron Magnet’s review in City Journal. Or you might not: It’s a fine review, but unusually long — 6,400 words. If you haven’t time for the whole thing, please at least read Myron’s stirring last paragraph, a mere 185 words. It is, to deploy my favorite Pat-Buchananism, right down the smokestack.
Here's that last paragraph, withe emphases added, for your entertainment pleasure:
A Fortune 500 CEO acquaintance of mine used to speak often about his corporate affirmative-action efforts. The last time we schmoozed, at the end of his tenure, he said, “You know how hard I’ve worked to recruit and promote talented minorities.” I did: it was an indulgent joke throughout the company. “Well guess what?” he said. “Every one of them has turned out to be an empty suit.” Dattel provides numbers throughout his book to flesh out this mournful if overstated conclusion. But what should worry us even more now is that the tech baby billionaires and their underlings are also ethically empty suits—or empty tee-shirts—thanks to the politically correct atmosphere in which their hugely expensive education takes place, so that even if they have technical skills, they are politically uninformed and dogmatic where they are not merely self-interestedly unprincipled, ready to collaborate with totalitarian governments, because they don’t know the difference between slavery and freedom—a forbidden value judgment. So we have a giant work of reconstruction to do, and don’t wait for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to do it.
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