I never found out exactly what happened at my former employer, but I got the impression that a command had come from on high -- diversity now! Not next year, but now! Not next month, but now! It was as if some emergency had arisen and a quota had to be filled as soon as possible.
The company had several branches, and the one I worked at was in Washington, DC. Had they contracted for the federal government it would have been explainable. When I went self-employed, my first client was a company that had a federal contract. I was a sub-contractor on that project, and as such I had to do the paperwork showing that my corporation met the requirements to qualify for government work. There was a questionnaire, about sixty pages (no joke!) to fill out, including items asking what percentage of my work force were minorities and other such things. That just scratches the surface, the legal requirements for doing government work can be pretty intense.
There was another man working on the project who was in a similar situation as me; he was also self-employed, had set up his own small corporation, and was a subcontractor as I was. He and I commiserated about the ridiculous questionnaire. He hired a lawyer to fill the thing out, and I don't even want to guess at how much he had to pay. I just drafted a statement saying, "I am the only employee of my corporation. I do not anticipate hiring additional employees in the near future. I do not advertise. [etc]" I attached that to the questionnaire. Then in the questionnaire itself, on item after item, I wrote, "See attached appendix." I figured I'd take my chances and try that first before hiring legal help. After I turned the thing in, I never heard anything about it. I seriously doubt anyone ever looked at the thing, it just got filed away somewhere.
So, had my former employer been doing government work it might have been understandable. But as a matter of policy they refused government work precisely because of the complications and legal expense. And they weren't being sued or anything, and as far as I could tell were in no danger of being sued or undergoing some other imminent crisis. The CEO and a couple of the other high executives were of the 1960s generation, college students at the time of Woodstock and Kent State. The scuttlebutt in the company was that board meetings were conducted with a lit bong passed around the room. I really think they just had a sudden flash of collective liberal guilt and went wacko.
It also led to an ugly situation with two other employees, Don and Paul. They had worked closely together on a project, were both sharp as hell, and had become good friends. Don was black and Paul was white. The two aforementioned fools, the schemer and the schmoozer, were both black. Paul quite openly treated them as fools because they were fools.
Well, of course, they started a whispering campaign that Paul was racist. They managed to push it to the point where the rumors were getting some real traction. Don put a stop to it. He stood up in an office meeting, looked the office manager, a VP, right in the eye, and gave it to her with both barrels. He said that she knew Paul well enough to know the rumors were horseshit, should have put a stop to the rumors but hadn't, so he was going to do her job for her. He said Paul was one of the finest people he had ever known and perhaps the least racist person he'd ever met in his life, and that the only thing he was prejudiced against was incompetence. He also said that the sudden diversity surge was a fucking embarrassment (direct quote), and that he'd repeat everything he had just said to anyone who wanted to know, including members of the press.
That got Paul off the hook. Like me, they both left the company soon after. The company went out of business a couple of years later.
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