Jelly Bean: the Sequel
The headline in the Wall Street Journal said "Racist E-Mail Messages at Donnelley Show Pattern of Bias, Attorneys Claim." The reference was to jokes and insults said to show "a long-term pattern of racial discrimination and harassment" at R.R. Donnelley & Sons, the huge printing company.
Journalists are a bit wary about sensational charges like this because of the dismal performance of the New York Times in the discrimination suit against Texaco. The Times hammered away at Texaco executives for slurring blacks as "n----rs" and "black jelly beans." It turned out that the Times, and the transcript of a taped conversation at Texaco cited by plaintiffs in court papers, were quite wrong. The jelly-bean remark referred to language used by a black diversity instructor and was not a slur. The reference to "n----rs" turned out to be a garbled mention of "St. Nicholas." The Times didn't verify the transcript, or even insert the word alleged in front of the word slurs. Because of the Times's immense authority, the factoid of these "slurs" was endlessly repeated in the media, turning up as true on one network show two months after it had been proved false.
It's hard to shed tears for Texaco. The tape has one irritated executive complaining about Kwanzaa and Hanuka for horning in on Christmas (narrow-minded but minor) and talking about the destruction of documents in the discrimination case (very serious). Still, Texaco was forced to settle the case quickly for a very large sum, $176 million, not on the legal merits but because of the worldwide furor aroused by the bad transcript and the Times's awful screwup.
Is the Donnelley case a rerun of the Texaco disaster, "Jelly Bean, Part 2"? Donnelley has explicitly charged that the plaintiffs are trying to turn the case into another Texaco. In the Donnelley case the slurs are apparently real, though we don't know how much the company knew about them or whether they created or reflected a pattern of bias.
Crude humor. A "Blacktionary" allegedly found on at least one site of the Donnelley computer system is a crude dictionary making fun of the diction and intelligence of blacks. The list of "165 racist, ethnic, and sexual jokes" turns out to be a collection of what used to be called "Polish jokes" or "Aggie jokes," one-liners about nearly all sexual and ethnic groups.
Obviously, the dictionary and the stupid jokes shouldn't be allowed in the workplace. But yes, it is starting to look like another Texaco. What the Texaco case proved is that if you can create enough bad publicity, depicting a company as hopelessly racist, you can win without ever going to trial. Though the media are predictably bored by the dry facts of job discrimination, they will almost always bite on colorful news about slurs and jokes. (The Donnelley slurs and jokes were not part of the original suit, which got very little publicity.)
After the first slur or joke story hits, a few other complaints are flushed out, which will appear to be part of a strong pattern of bias, whether they are or not. (In the Texaco case, it was a birthday cake with an apparently well-meaning but racist message, helpfully shown in a large photo in the Sunday New York Times.) Before long, the target company will hire a prominent black protector (former Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr. by Texaco; ex-Secretary of the Army Clifford Alexander by Donnelley).
Feeling cornered, and rightly fearing that the corporate name will never be cleared, the company will contribute to Jesse Jackson when he appears on the scene, and it will redouble its commitment to "managing diversity." This can mean hiring a new level of executives with no known function. It often means forcing employees to endure "diversity training," the only function of which is to ward off lawsuits. "Diversity training is generally nonsense," Alexander said in an unexpected burst of candor that preceded his hiring by the beleaguered folks at Donnelley. "Many managers who go to them think they're laughable." Many columnists think so too.
The loss of face can be enough to make the company lurch toward a quota system. Check out the words of the obviously wounded Texaco chairman and CEO Peter Bijur talking about the "goals--they are not quotas," which have now been "set by determining what the demographics of Texaco's work force are likely to be in the year 2000." Promising to meet demographic-based goals-which-are-not-quotas is diversityspeak for the English sentence: "We are going to have quotas."
Corporate America has not adapted to the new era of huge settlements that are drawing more high-rolling litigators and revenue-hungry diversity entrepreneurs into the field. The Donnelley case shows that three years' worth of diversity programs is no protection. The Texaco case shows that a huge company can be brought to its knees quickly, even by questionable evidence. Somehow sensible policies have to be framed around the right message: Diversity is not a goal; it is the natural byproduct of a genuinely open company that hires and promotes by energy and talent.
This story appears in the February 10, 1997 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.