This appears to have been the case at Sky TV, where a diversity officer told a Latina colleague that she must have been “oppressed”. The colleague rightly objected and later won a race discrimination claim in an employment tribunal over the comments. Whatever the merits of this particular case – and I, unlike too many woke activists, am willing to give those involved the benefit of the doubt – it speaks to a much bigger problem. A new ideology is being imposed on corporate Britain, promoted by powerful HR executives. What were once mere staff departments have been taken over by highly organized activists who successfully exploit the moral confusion over racial issues with disappointing results. Despite claiming to be “anti-racist,” their worldview rehabilitates racial thinking—holding that seeing race and judging based on race is not unjust, but a virtue, as long as it’s done by the right kind of person. They tried to delegitimize colorblindness, which supports equality under the law. And they spout all the usual modern language – including hierarchies of oppression, ‘white fragility’ and ‘white privilege’. The result has been the opposite of inclusive: it has fueled divisions between groups and encouraged patronizing attitudes towards ethnic minority employees who simply want to be judged on their ability to do their jobs. We can hardly expect corporate HR activists – the soldiers of the Diversity Industrial Complex – to wake up to the fact that they are unwittingly normalizing a form of racism in the workplace. Even the smartest corporate executives have been blinded to this. Out of a combination of fear and PR opportunism, they have fallen over themselves to jump on the bandwagon, dishing out millions of pounds to diversity ‘czars’, ‘partners’ and ‘officers’. In boardrooms, only the bravest souls were willing to state the obvious: that stereotypes must be rejected no matter who they come from. that making negative assumptions about people because of their race is racism. and that ethnic minorities are not all the same, but indeed have a wide range of experiences and political views. These truths are the antidote to the Diversity Industrial Complex – which, by the way, has a vested interest in dismissing evidence that Britain is actually a good place to go if you come from a minority background. So the onus is now on corporate leaders to take up that fight. They should distance themselves from this industry and replace ideological “task forces” and implicit bias training with robust whistleblowing systems to deal with individual allegations of racism. This would not only free the workers from the burdens of the policy but would certainly save a lot of money. In this age of skyrocketing inflation and rising interest rates, they would be fools and bad businessmen not to accept it.
