Americans and Social Trust
Who trusts whom? And why? A Pew Social Trends Survey casts some new light on a question that has bedeviled philosophers and social scientists through the ages.

Download report:  http://pewresearch.org/assets/social/pdf/SocialTrust.pdf

By BARBARA HOBEROCK World Capitol Bureau
9/11/2007

Diversity, Inc.

By Jennifer Millman

Affirmative-action foe Ward Connerly makes an easy sell to the public by calling for "equal opportunity" and a "colorblind society," a distortion of civil-rights language that has duped the public into banning affirmative action in public education, employment and contracting in Michigan, California and Washington state. Now he's at it again.

 

But this time, he's run into a roadblock in Missouri, one of five states—along with Arizona, Colorado, Nebraska and Oklahoma—where he's campaigning to ban affirmative action in 2008 as part of his previously announced "Super Tuesday for Equal Rights."

 

If these initiatives are approved by voters in these states, "equality" is unlikely to be the outcome. The anti-affirmative-action camp intentionally uses vague language to confuse voters who might be turned off by a proposed ban on affirmative action in their state. Fortunately, language for ballot measures to amend state constitutions must first be approved by the state officials, such as the attorney general and secretary of state, which led to a three-year delay in Michigan before Connerly could get the ban before voters. A similar situation is unfolding in Missouri.

Controversy in Missouri

Following the modus operandi of Connerly's national campaign, the so-called Missouri Civil Rights Initiative (MoCRI), proposed language that didn't once mention the term "affirmative action" in a ballot measure that would ban it from public employment, education and contracting if the public says yes. It said: "The state shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education, or public contracting." Read it here.

 

Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan and Attorney General Jay Nixon say no. They changed the language to reflect the actual purpose of the ballot initiative, which is to eliminate affirmative action, and to include a second provision that would allow "race preferences" where affirmative-action programs are required to be eligible for federal funding. Read the state's version.

 

Connerly lambasted the state officials for allegedly trying to keep the initiative off the 2008 ballot, calling it an "abuse of constitutional office." MoCRI filed an appeal to overrule the state's ballot language.

 

But the American Association for Affirmative Action (AAAA), which recently launched a Task Force on Equity in the States to fight Connerly's machine, approves of Carnahan's move and wrote a letter to the editor of the Kansas City Star to that effect. The letter highlights the deceptive wording on the Missouri initiative. Carnahan wrote a letter thanking the organization for its support and commending its efforts to preserve equality.

"We think she's doing the right thing, and those who seek equity should do so with clean hands. Some of the draft initiatives in other states were simply misleading,"  AAAA Executive Director Shirley Wilcher told DiversityInc.

AAAA is one of many organizations committed to fighting Connerly and his crew, yet a recent Diverse Issues in Higher Education article suggests most civil-rights organizations have given up hope of defeating him, in light of two recent Supreme Court decisions on voluntary school integration that affirmative-action foes have used for momentum by manipulating public interpretation to suit their agenda. This only adds fuel to Connerly's argument that we have reached the "end of an era."

Wilcher disputes the conclusions of the Diverse Issues in Higher

 

Education article. "They didn't go far enough to interview people who really are concerned," she says. "There are groups, I understand, at least in Missouri, who are beginning to gather to discuss their response."

 

The campaigns are still in the early stages, which may explain the lack of public outcry.

 

"People are assessing what happened in Michigan, and they're probably tailoring their efforts on the local level, depending upon where people stand on this issue," says Wilcher. "The states are different; their economic situations are different and they have to develop their strategies accordingly. I'm not [in Missouri], but I sense that there's more happening than is obvious ... I don't think there's enough evidence that people have given up just because some particularly older or younger folks just don't understand it. It's far too premature." 

 

What Happens Next?

 

Twenty-three states allow voter-approved ballot initiatives to amend state constitutions. MoCRI says it needs 139,000 signatures to get the measure on the 2008 ballot, which is about 3.3 percent of the state's voting population, most of which is white, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey. It's no coincidence that most of Connerly's current campaigns are in states where white people are disproportionately represented compared with the nation and blacks are drastically underrepresented. (See chart below.) 

 

 

 

The initiatives in the five states are staffed with a who's who of prominent conservative activists, including Linda Chavez, president and founder of the anti-affirmative-action Center for Equal Opportunity, who is honorary co-chair of the Colorado initiative. John Uhlmann, a wealthy Kansas City businessman who gave $190,000 to Connerly's failed efforts to pass a 2003 bill that would have prohibited state and local government from classifying people on the basis of "race, ethnicity, color or national origin" in California, is honorary chair of the MoCRI. Uhlmann co-founded a politicized media group that became known for producing and airing controversial radio ads with "reverse reparations" messages aimed at African-American communities during the 2002 election cycle.
 
Connerly says all five campaigns are "going extremely well," reports Cybercast News. With more than a year to go before the initiatives would appear on state ballots, civil-rights leaders and state supporters of affirmative action should use the time wisely to educate the public about the real threat posed by the initiative and how to interpret the misleading messages of the campaign, says Wilcher.
 
While many factors are still at play, such as "how the language is drafted, whether its challenged beforehand, the will of the people," Wilcher says "what's important is for the media to clearly help us to educate America on what affirmative action is and is not."
 
Affirmative action is not a "black/white" issue, for one thing, says Wilcher, who often reads these comments, primarily from white women.
 
"The beneficiaries are far broader," she explains, citing the people with disabilities and veterans in the Department of Labor who have also benefited from affirmative action. "The first thing we need to do is educate. Given the demographics of the future, if we don't have affirmative action, we'll have to reinvent it."

 

Wilcher emphatically disagrees. "It's not fair to say people have walked away from this," she says. "People are taking different approaches. I think we're far from over."

 

 

 

 

Newswise — New research from Northeastern University sociologist Matthew O. Hunt reveals a growing convergence of beliefs among major U.S. ethnic groups regarding what drives the socioeconomic divide between blacks and whites in America.

The study, which appears in the flagship journal of sociology, the American Sociological Review, tracks changes from 1977-2004 in Americans’ beliefs regarding why blacks are disadvantaged in areas such as jobs, income, and housing.

According to Hunt’s study, whites have shown a decline in support for the belief that socioeconomic inequality is due to an innate or genetic inferiority among blacks. Instead, whites are increasingly likely to blame hindered access to quality education and/or a lack of motivation among blacks as root causes for their disadvantages.

Hunt’s research also reveals a conservative shift in philosophy among African-Americans and Hispanics. Both of these groups – like whites – show increased belief that lack of motivation among blacks is to blame for socioeconomic inequality. At the same time – and unlike whites – African-Americans and Hispanics also exhibit a clear decline in the belief that racial discrimination drives inequality.

Of the three groups studied, African-Americans are still most likely to view discrimination – and least likely to view motivation – as causes for socioeconomic inequality.

While significant differences in beliefs remain, Hunt believes these changes demonstrate a convergence of beliefs between minority groups and whites; one that could significantly influence race-based public policy in years to come.

“The opinion-shifts for white respondents are mostly continuations of trends we’ve seen in past research,” states Hunt. “What surprised me was the nature and extent of the conservative shifts in views for African-Americans and Hispanics. Given what we know about links between these beliefs and support for public policies designed to counter discrimination, programs such as affirmative action may lose additional ground if Americans’ racial attitudes continue to trend in an individualistic direction.”

Hunt’s study uses data from General Social Surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). These annual surveys averaged around 1,500 participants until 1994 when the study became biennial and samples sizes approximately doubled.

Another noteworthy finding by Hunt is an increase in the belief that none of the explanations offered in the surveys explain black/white inequality; possibly indicating that racial disparities are no longer perceived, or that causes beyond those included in the survey are seen as responsible.

About Northeastern:

Founded in 1898, Northeastern University is a private research university located in the heart of Boston. Northeastern is a leader in interdisciplinary research, urban engagement, and the integration of classroom learning with real-world experience. The university’s distinctive cooperative education program, where students alternate semesters of full-time study with semesters of paid work in fields relevant to their professional interests and major, is one of the largest and most innovative in the world. The University offers a comprehensive range of undergraduate and graduate programs leading to degrees through the doctorate in six undergraduate colleges, eight graduate schools, and two part-time divisions. For more information, please visit http://www.northeastern.edu.

Contact Hunt:

http://www.atsweb.neu.edu/sociology/m.hunt/ 

In a study entitled "Best Practices or Best Guesses? Assessing the Efficacy of Corporate Affirmative Action and Diversity Policies," researchers examined and compared the effectiveness of three distinct approaches of increasing the number of women and minorities that are hired and promoted within an organization.

 

Alexandra Kalev of the University of California, Berkeley, Frank Dobbin of Harvard University and Erin Kelly of the University of Minnesota studied three approaches ranging from organizational restructuring, to focusing on education and training of individuals in an attempt to eliminate bias at the managerial level. The researchers also studied the effects of reducing the social isolation of females and minority groups by improving the professional networks and mentorship opportunities available. Not surprisingly, these various approaches found different levels of effectiveness overall, some methods proving more successful to certain groups than others.

 

To obtain quantifiable results, the researchers examined the effects of seven common diversity programs, including affirmative action plans, diversity committees and taskforces, diversity managers, diversity training, diversity evaluation for managers, networking programs, and mentoring programs.

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~dobbin/cv/working_papers/aapracticesFinalProof.pdf

God’s Harvard: The New Grooming Ground of the Evangelical Movement

By Hanna Rosin, Harcourt
Posted on August 23, 2007, Printed on August 23, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/60487/

When I first began covering religion for the Washington Post, more than ten years ago, deflecting conversion attempts became a routine part of my work. Although they are unfailingly gracious, evangelicals are not so good at respecting professional boundaries. What did it matter that I was a reporter doing my job if I was headed for eternal damnation? To a population of domestic missionaries, I presented as a prime target: a friendly non-Christian who was deeply interested in learning more about their beliefs.

The first time someone tried to share the gospel with me, I naively explained that I was Jewish and born in Israel, thank you, thinking this would end the conversation. This was a big mistake. In certain parts of Christian America, admitting I was an Israeli-born Jew turned me into walking catnip. Because God's own chosen people had so conspicuously rejected Jesus, winning one over was an irresistible challenge. And the Holy Land glamour of Israel only added to the allure. Preachers told me they loved me, half an hour after we met. Godly women asked if they could take home a piece of my clothing and pray over it. A pastor's wife once confided to my husband, "You're so lucky. She looks so ... Biblical." Once, at a Waffle House in Colorado with some associates of the influential Christian activist James Dobson, a woman in our company stared at me so hard it became uncomfortable for me to eat. Finally, I looked up at her. "When I look at you, I see the blood of our Savior coursing through your veins," she said.

"Thank you," I gulped. "More maple syrup?"

Explaining that my family had been Jewish for many generations and that, by converting, I'd be breaking a deep, rich tradition only encouraged them to break out the big gun. I've heard it so many times that I can recite it by heart. Matthew 10:36: "For I have come to turn a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law -- a man's enemies will be the members of his own household. Anyone who loves his father or mother more than me is not worthy of me." This didn't stick with me, either. Clearly they had not met my mother, or any Jewish mother for that matter. The Jews haven't endured for nearly 4,000 years by giving their cubs up so easy.

Biblical verses, like turtlenecks go in and out of style. During the nineties I heard Matthew 10:36 on nearly every reporting trip. This was a paradoxical decade for evangelicals. The Christian right had become a fixture in American politics and the nation was about to elect George W. Bush, the closest thing American evangelicals have had to a pope. At the same time the Christian home-school movement was booming -- a relic of the age of separatism and retreat. Evangelicals were poised to move from the fringe to the elite power circles of American society, but they just couldn't seem to make the jump. Unless they learned to polish their act and stop telling people to renounce their mothers, they would never make it.

I first visited Patrick Henry College in September 1999, a year before the school opened its doors. The "school," that afternoon, consisted of founder Michael Farris, a Christian homeschooling activist, manning an excavator on a construction site just off a Virginia highway exit. Farris was affable, his usual manner with reporters, as he laid out the plans for his revolution. The school would enlist the purest of born-again Christians in a war to "transform America" by training them to occupy the highest offices in the land." Year after year, it would churn out future congressmen, governors, and federal judges, until they finally had the majority. "Few students will know more about the political ramifications of reinforcing homosexuality through special rights than ours," he told me. One day, he bragged, he would introduce the ultimate graduation-day speaker: "President So and So, an alumnus of Patrick Henry."

It all sounded a little far-fetched. After all, he hadn't even laid the first brick.

Then Bush ran for president as a born-again former alcoholic, and won. Suddenly Farris seemed much less delusional. In the early winter of 2005 I visited again. The central building, Founders Hall, was now an impressive Federalist structure. Inside, the walls were covered with posters for an upcoming production of Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. A Whiffenpoofs-style singing group occupied the grand staircase. After talking to some kids having lunch, I concluded they were some of the most anal, competitive teenagers I had every come across. They input their daily schedules into Palm Pilots in fifteen-minute increments -- read Bible, do crunches, take shower, study for Latin quiz, write debate briefs. After Jesus Christ they bowed down to the "1600's" -- the handful of kids each year who'd gotten perfect scores on the SAT. The atmosphere was much more Harvard than Bob Jones.

They resembled the overambitious junior executives who populate the Ivy League these days -- only without the political apathy. Hardly a dorm window, car bumper, bathroom mirror, or laptop went unsullied by some campaign slogan -- for George Bush, John Thune, Bobby Jindal, or one of the many Christian conservatives who won during the 2004 campaign. Many students had taken a sanctioned two weeks off classes to volunteer for campaigns, and they were giddy with victory. One senior told me how she'd sacrificed a couple of weekends helping out Bush adviser Karl Rove. One Saturday afternoon, he stopped by to give her a thank-you present. "Good thing it was an ice-cream sandwich or I would have kept it forever!"

"You are the tip of the spear," Farris likes to tell his students at morning chapel, drawing on his limitless arsenal of military metaphors. Polls would place them among the 29 percent of Christian teens who attend church weekly, pray, read the Bible, and describe religion as "extremely important" in their lives. Sociologically speaking, they are a parent's dream. They are less likely than most teenagers to cut classes, do drugs, have sex, get depressed, feel alone or misunderstood, talk back, or lie. Within the third of Americans who call themselves "evangelical" or "born again" they make up an elite corps, focused, disciplined, and not prone to distraction.

When they use the word "Christian," they are speaking their own special language. To them, a Catholic or Mormon, with some exceptions, is not really a Christian. Someone who goes to church three times a year and sings hymns is not a Christian. Someone who goes to church every Sunday and calls themselves "evangelical" is not even necessarily a Christian. "She thought I was nice and Jesus was a great guy and she went to church a lot, but she wasn't a Christian," Farris once told a group of students about an acquaintance, and they understood exactly what he meant. To them, a "Christian" keeps a running conversation with God in his or her head always, Monday through Sunday, on subjects big and small, and believes that at any moment God might in some palpable way step in and show He either cares or disapproves.

On the issues that have come to define the modern Christian right, the students at Patrick Henry generally cleave to orthodoxy. During my year and a half on campus, I never heard any student argue that homosexuality is not a sin, or that abortion should be allowed in any circumstances. I heard people criticize Bush, but only from the right. After the 2004 campaign, I heard a rumor that someone had voted for John Kerry. I chased down many leads. All dead ends. If it was true, no one would admit it publicly. At Baylor University in Waco, Texas, a much older Baptist institution that's lately been trying to modernize, the student newspaper defended gay marriage in 2004. Such a transgression is unthinkable at Patrick Henry -- so beyond the pale that the possibility is mentioned only in passing in the otherwise-very-thorough student code of conduct.

Yet a Patrick Henry student is unlikely to be caught on camera giving a loony Jerry Falwell-style rant about gays and lesbians causing September 11. They worry about gay rights, but they worry just as much about mainstream culture's thinking they're homophobic. "Yes, it's a sin, but so are a hundred other things," one of the students told me, in a self-conscious nod to the "whatever" cadence of his peers. One day a CNN crew came to film a feature story on the school on the same day some students had made two snowmen holding wooden paddles. The snow sculpture was an inside joke about the students' fratlike ritual, recently criticized in the school newspaper, of paddling newly engaged boys. But Farris was mortified. "Do you really want a story to develop that suggests a connection between PHC and those that have beaten homosexuals, etc.?" he wrote in an e-mail to some students who had defended the snowmen as a harmless prank. "PHC 'a school for vigilante justice.' Is that the image you want?"

At first, when I encountered students who were wary about being interviewed by me, I assumed it was because of the usual evangelicals' suspicion of outsiders. After a while I realized it wasn't that at all. Mostly, they were protecting their résumés. "If I want to get into politics, no history is a good history," class president Aaron Carlson told me. "I want to be prudent that nothing I say is ever misconstrued." The Patrick Henry generation will not repeat the mistakes of their fathers. They are not the reckless, fuming, fed-up generation that left Egypt -- evangelical code for the modern world. They are the "Joshua Generation," as Farris likes to say, the first ones savvy enough to "take back the land."

Patrick Henry students are supposed to be lights unto the world, an example to the unsaved. And yet, there I was, blind as can be, and no one on campus tried to convert me, at least not outright. I never once heard Matthew 10:36. No one told me to turn against my mother, and no one told me I looked like Jesus. Once Sarah Chambers, a PHC student I knew well, left me a note about a book I'd loaned her, a memoir by a former evangelical. She said the book was charming and funny and astutely observed but ultimately unsatisfying because the author fundamentally did not understand what it meant to have a close personal relationship with God. ("If you don't have it yourself it's hard to understand what motivates these 'crazy fanatics,'" she wrote.) I took the note personally. Months into my reporting, I still didn't understand.

I began to ask around: What does it mean to keep up a running conversation with Jesus in your head, and at the same time to function in the modern world? I asked as a reporter, but the question kept striking people in a way I didn't intend. To Farris and many of the students I knew, I seemed to be sending out the signal that I was open to hearing The Word. Farris loaned me Dallas Willard's Hearing God and one afternoon pulled a splinter out of my hand, which at the moment felt close to bathing the feet of the sinner. He prayed "that things come up to help me really show her what it means to have a relationship with God. I feel so inadequate. This is so strange." One sweet freshman told me, "Uhm, well, I like you and I'd just feel really bad if you died and you weren't sure."

Farris must have known I'd be a hard case. I am Jewish, and most of my family lives in Israel; I spent my teenage years in Queens, New York, in the eighties, where my idea of a dress code was matching my miniskirt to my handball gloves. I work and leave my children for several hours a week in the charge of a babysitter who is (gasp!) not related to me. I firmly believe the earth is 4.5 billion years old, or whatever the current scientific consensus says. I have many beloved gay friends and have never once suggested to any of them that they enter into reparative therapy to "cure their disease."

I am naturally democratic almost to a fault. (I've always been grateful that I don't live in a country ruled by a despot, since I could have ended up the one to "humanize" him.) So, despite our differences, I had no trouble letting them in.

For a few weeks during the summer of 2005, Sarah Chambers lived with my family. She'd gotten an internship at a national magazine based in Washington, D. C., and needed a place to stay. When I told my friends this, most of them would give me a quizzical why-are-you-harboring-Nazis-in-your-attic look. Once they met her, they were even more worried. Sarah is charismatic, funny, and adventurous. She climbs, snowboards, and plays the guitar. Her musical tastes range from Jack Johnson to Puff Daddy. She's a terrific writer and was the only intern in her class hired for a full-time job. She could be one of those power girls in a Nike ad, looking glamorous even at the end of a marathon. On top of that, she's an astute judge of character with an introspective side. Sometimes in the mornings I'd find her upstairs in her bed, reading her Bible and taking notes. "If they're all like this," one of my friends said, "we're in trouble."

Often, in the evenings, we would sit around and talk about what she believes. One night my husband finally asked her the question: "So, are we going to Hell?" The Patrick Henry statement of faith, which Sarah and all the other students have to sign, is quite explicit on this question. Satan is real, it says, so is Hell. "All who die outside of Christ shall be confined in conscious torment for eternity." Barring the Second Coming, chances are quite high that my husband and I and our two young children are going to die outside of Christ.

At this point, Sarah had been living with us for almost a month. She'd bathed our children and read them bedtime stories. She'd given my five-year-old daughter a magnificent white model horse, Snow White, that she herself had loved as a child.

"Yes," she answered. "But I'm not jumping up and down with joy about it."

Copyright © 2007 Hanna Rosin from the book God's Harvard by Hanna Rosin
Published by Harcourt; September 2007;$25.00US; 978-0-15-101262-6

For more information, visit www.GodsHarvard.com.

Hanna Rosin has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post. She has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, GQ, and the New York Times. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Slate deputy editor David Plotz, and their two children.

New blog on socially responsible investing and the linkage to diversity.  check it out here:

http://twisri.blogspot.com/

Christiane Amanpour's work on the documentary series "God's Warriors" took her directly to intersections of extreme religious and secular thinking. She watched, fascinated, as demonstrators in San Francisco accused teenagers in the fundamentalist Christian group BattleCry of intolerance in a clash of two cultures that will probably never understand each other. Understanding is what Amanpour is trying to promote in "God's Warriors," which takes up six prime-time hours on CNN this week. The series on religious fundamentalism among Christians, Muslims and Jews airs in three parts, 9 p.m. EDT Tuesday through Thursday. Many people know only stereotypes of these true believers, even the ones in their own country, she said.


<a href="http://www.religionnewsblog.com/19020/god-s-warriors>God’s Warriors: CNN’s Amanpour Looks at Zealots</a>

The Death of Diversity
People in ethnically diverse settings don't care about each other.

BY DANIEL HENNINGER
Thursday, August 16, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Diversity was once just another word. Now it's a fighting word. One of the biggest problems with diversity is that it won't let you alone. Corporations everywhere have force-marched middle managers into training sessions led by "diversity trainers." Most people already knew that the basic idea beneath diversity emerged about 2,000 years ago under two rubrics: Love thy neighbor as thyself, and Do unto others as they would do unto you. Then suddenly this got rewritten as "appreciating differentness."

George Bernard Shaw is said to have demurred from the Golden Rule. "Do not do unto others as you would have them do unto you," Shaw advised. "Their tastes may not be the same." No such voluntary opt-out is permissible in our time. The parsons of the press made diversity into a secular commandment; do a word-search of "diversity" in a broad database of newspapers and it might come up 250 million times. In the Supreme Court term just ended, the Seattle schools integration case led most of the justices into arcane discussions of diversity's legal compulsions. More recently it emerged that the University of Michigan, a virtual Mecca of diversity, announced it would install Muslim footbaths in bathrooms, causing a fight.

Now comes word that diversity as an ideology may be dead, or not worth saving. Robert Putnam, the Harvard don who in the controversial bestseller "Bowling Alone" announced the decline of communal-mindedness amid the rise of home-alone couch potatoes, has completed a mammoth study of the effects of ethnic diversity on communities. His researchers did 30,000 interviews in 41 U.S. communities. Short version: People in ethnically diverse settings don't want to have much of anything to do with each other. "Social capital" erodes. Diversity has a downside.

Prof. Putnam isn't exactly hiding these volatile conclusions, though he did introduce them in a journal called Scandinavian Political Studies. A great believer in the efficacy of what social scientists call "reciprocity," he wasn't happy with what he found but didn't mince words describing the results:

"Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television." The diversity nightmare gets worse: They have little confidence in the "local news media." This after all we've done for them.

Colleagues and diversity advocates, disturbed at what was emerging from the study, suggested alternative explanations. Prof. Putnam and his team re-ran the data every which way from Sunday and the result was always the same: Diverse communities may be yeasty and even creative, but trust, altruism and community cooperation fall. He calls it "hunkering down."

Give me a break! you scream. What about New York City or L.A.? From the time of Sherwood Anderson's "Winesburg, Ohio" through "Peyton Place" and beyond, people have fled the flat-lined, gossip-driven homogeneity of small American "communities" for the welcome anonymity of big-city apartment building--so long as your name wasn't Kitty Genovese, the famous New York woman who bled to death crying for help.

It's a wonderfully thought-provoking study, suitable for arguing the length of a long August weekend and available as a lecture on Prof. Putnam's Harvard Web site, the "Saguaro Seminar." Astute readers, however, have already guessed who's thrilled with the results.

Pat Buchanan, reflecting an array of commentaries on the study from the American right, says, "Putnam provides supporting fire from Harvard Yard for those who say America needs a time-out from mass immigration, be it legal or illegal." The "antis" believe the Putnam study hammers the final intellectual nail in the coffin of immigration and diversity.

The diversity ideologues deserve whatever ill tidings they get. They're the ones who weren't willing to persuade the public of diversity's merits, preferring to turn "diversity" into a political and legal hammer to compel compliance. The conversions were forced conversions. As always, with politics comes pushback. And it never stops.

The harvest of bitter fruit from the diversity wars begun three decades ago across campuses, corporations and newsrooms has made the immigration debate significantly worse. Diversity's advocates gave short shrift to assimilation, indeed arguing that assimilation into the American mainstream was oppressive and coercive. So they demoted assimilation and elevated "differences." Then they took the nation to court. Little wonder the immigration debate is riven with distrust.

The diversity ideologues ruined a good word and, properly understood, a decent notion. What's needed now is for a younger black, brown or polka-dot writer to recast the idea in a way that restores the worth and utility of assimilation. Somebody had better do it soon; the first chart offered in the Putnam study depicts inexorably rising rates of immigration in many nations. The idea that the U.S. can wave into effect a 10-year "time out" on immigration flows is as likely as King Canute commanding the tides to recede.

Here, too, Robert Putnam has a possible assimilation model. Hold onto your hat. It's Christian evangelical megachurches. "In many large evangelical congregations," he writes, "the participants constituted the largest thoroughly integrated gatherings we have ever witnessed." This, too, is an inconvenient truth. They do it with low entry barriers to the church and by offering lots of little groups to join inside the larger "shared identity" of the church. A Harvard prof finds good in evangelical megachurches. Send this man a suit of body armor!

My own model for the way forward in a 21st century American society of unavoidable ethnic multitudes is an old one, a phrase found nowhere in the Putnam study or any commentary on it: the middle class. Its assimilating virtues may be boring, but it works, if you work at getting into it.

Of course Hillary Clinton believes this can't happen here because the middle class has been "invisible" to George Bush. As with diversity, progress is always just beyond the horizon.

Mr. Henninger is deputy editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page. His column appears Thursdays in the Journal and on OpinionJournal.com.

Confronting a New Era of Diversity By Mark A. Emmert Affirmative-action laws have been limited or eliminated in some states. Now colleges need to find new ways of ensuring diversity. Here, University of Washington President Mark Emmert tells you how to do it right.   Access to equal opportunity distinguishes and strengthens the United States. The country has aggressively pursued this ideal over the past 50 years with federal policies and court decisions that opened colleges and universities to ethnic and racial populations that had historically been vastly underrepresented.   Affirmative action, the federal program that was most influential in helping build diverse campuses, has been slowly but demonstrably eroded over the past 10 years through a combination of statewide referenda and now the latest Supreme Court decision limiting the use of race in school choice.   These incursions have occurred despite the conviction of a vast array of business leaders, government officials, and university administrators that for the past 35 years, affirmative action has been a remarkably successful tool in the quest for equity in access to higher education.   Five key states—collectively enrolling over half a million students each year—currently are operating under severe constraints regarding the use of race as a factor in admissions decisions. The electorate in three states—California, Washington, and Michigan—has emphatically voted to abolish the use of affirmative action in public university admissions. Two other populous states—Texas and Florida—have implemented admissions processes that have limited or eliminated the use of affirmative action. On the horizon, we can see efforts to eradicate affirmative action being mounted in additional states for the 2008 election cycle.   What had been a national policy is being dismantled, state by state. Each state that has abandoned affirmative action has had to ascertain separately its legal ability and the boundaries that would allow it to foster diversity. Because each state's context differs, America is developing fragmented solutions to the challenge of maintaining a diverse student body, a challenge that many courts continue to see as a "compelling interest" for the nation.   And because the U.S. has gone from a national policy to a set of disparate solutions, it faces a conundrum: Even as university leaders in post-affirmative-action states support the goals of a highly diversified student body, they must show that without the tool of affirmative action, they can still build a diverse, talented, highly competitive student population.   For university presidents and administrators like myself, who have grown up in a world where affirmative action was solidly embraced, it has been an awakening to find ourselves leading institutions that must now accomplish diversity without using the tool of affirmative action. I recognize the significant role that policy has played, and I do not wish its elimination where it is still permitted. But without it, we must work very hard to increase all types of diversity at our institutions.   In the states that have had to create new policies in the absence of affirmative action, there have been successes and disappointments, and we have seen that it can take years to begin to recover from the elimination of this tool.   What we discovered in Washington was that there are other ways to ensure diversity and access to higher education, particularly by taking socioeconomic factors into account. One essential element was undertaking an intensive effort to encourage more students from disadvantaged backgrounds to apply to the university. This meant convincing them that there was indeed a place for them at an institution like ours, that they were welcome, and that they could be successful here.   Additionally, we had to find a way to take economic considerations off the table. Many universities, including Washington, have instituted programs ensuring that students from low and lower-middle income families will be able to attend college tuition-free, creating a compelling new approach to diversity and recognizing the impact of economic standing.   We have also adopted a holistic admissions review process, a labor-intensive enterprise that is well worth the effort. The more we can know about each individual student who applies, the better informed our admissions decisions are. The results so far are promising: The academic level of our entering students is as good as it had been prior to holistic review, and the student body is more diverse.   All of us—whether or not we still can use affirmative action—need to pool our collective experience and data to establish the best ways of being accessible to applicants from all strata of our society. We know that critical elements include increased outreach, improvements to financial aid, and holistic admission models. We have been told by corporate leaders, by elected officials, and by the armed forces, that more diverse organizations are better organizations. Indeed, our own experiences in overseeing universities demonstrates this fact. Entry to our universities and colleges provides the opportunity for many to rise economically and improve their lives and add to the vigor of our nation. It is a key to our future success and should be accessible to all.   Mark A. Emmert is president of the University of Washington.

The downside of diversity

A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life. What happens when a liberal scholar unearths an inconvenient truth?

By Michael Jonas  |  August 5, 2007

IT HAS BECOME increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.

But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam -- famous for "Bowling Alone," his 2000 book on declining civic engagement -- has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.

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Consumers drive diversity
Some industries struggle to bring more minorities into work force.

ST. LOUIS - Consumer packaged-goods companies and retailers in touch with the public every day are among industry groups making the biggest strides in diversifying their workplaces, and law firms are among those lagging behind, according to speakers at the National Urban League’s conference.

The effectiveness of corporate programs aimed at improving diversity is a key concern of the Urban League, which works toward helping blacks enter the economic and social mainstream. The conference took place last week in St. Louis.

One of the panel discussions at the meeting focused on diversity programs, and participants said a key driver is demand by consumers.

"Our customers want to see people who look like them," said Margot Copeland, executive vice president of Cleveland-based KeyCorp, one of the nation’s largest bank-based financial services companies. Copeland was a speaker at the program.

Because of this, companies that "touch the masses" are making some of the greatest advances in diversifying their work forces, said Janet Reid, a partner with Global Lead, a Cincinnati-based management consulting firm that specializes in diversity programs.

Consumer packaged-goods companies and retailers are among those, Reid said in an interview after the discussion. She said examples are Procter & Gamble Co. and Limited Brands Inc.

Among businesses at the other end of the spectrum are law firms, though they are making significant efforts to diversify, she said.

"Law firms are a special breed," Reid said. "Recruiting" of minorities "is difficult. Retention is even harder, and advancing, particularly" black "women, is even harder."

A study by the American Bar Association’s Commission on Women in the Profession released last year showed black women experienced stereotyping and harassment and that they felt passed over for desirable assignments and access to significant billable hours and felt excluded from networking opportunities.

Meanwhile, minority women constitute 1.48 percent of partners in the nation’s major law firms, and minority men account for 3.53 percent of partners, the National Association for Law Placement reported last year.

In a separate interview, Marc Morial, National Urban League president and chief executive, also voiced concern about diversity at law firms. Morial, a lawyer, pointed out that the law profession produces presidents, congressmen, mayors and chief executives.

"Lawyers command great power in this society. While there have been many, many important efforts to create diversity in the legal profession, I think diversity, as far it concerns African-Americans’ ability to get hired and move up the ladder at major law firms, is woefully lagging."

He said law firms, like other types of businesses, are being pressured to diversify by clients. In-house counsel at many major corporations, such as Sara Lee Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc., have agreed to consider firing law firms that failed to meet certain criteria.

However, there are special problems in achieving diversity efforts at law firms.

One issue is that big law firms place too much emphasis on grades and will only hire students that graduate at the top of their classes, he said.

"Grades are not always the best predictor as to whether someone will be successful in the profession," he said.

The "obsession" with grades stems from attorneys at law firms who want to hire people "just like them" with similar academic credentials and background.

"They call it the mirror-image rule, and you’ve got to break the mirror-image rule," Morial said.

Excellent website with lots of great information.

http://www.pbs.org/race/004_HumanDiversity/004_00-home.htm

House Votes to Overturn U.S. Supreme Court Wage-Bias Decision

By Julian Bond

This is a speech by Julian Bond, Chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors and given at their 98th annual convention held this year at Cobo Hall in Detroit.

It was ninety-eight years ago, during the first week of 1909, when three people met to form what would become the NAACP. One was the descendant of abolitionists, the second was Jewish, and the third was a Southerner -- a Southerner whose mother's people were Kentucky slaveholders, as my father's people were Kentucky slaves.

That first meeting produced a Call -- issued on February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. The Call asked the nation then as we ask it today:

How far has it gone in assuring to each and every citizen, irrespective of color, the equality of opportunity and equality before the law, which underlie our American institutions and are guaranteed by the Constitution?

It called upon "all [the] believers in democracy" to gather for a national conference which eventually resulted in the NAACP.

The original incorporation papers of the NAACP listed as its goals:

To promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or racial prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, and complete equality before the law.

That remains our mission today.

Then, as now, nativists argued for further restrictions on immigration, seeking an ethnically pure America.

Then, segregationists mandated the separation of blacks and whites in all public places; now, neo-segregationists want to end racial remedies in all public institutions and place restrictions on access to the ballot box which fall most heavily on racial minorities and the poor.

Then, as now, racism masquerading as science proclaimed the genetic inferiority of black people, an acceptable antidote for the status anxieties of America's shrinking majority.

And then, as now, racial scapegoating became a substitute for real solutions to complex problems, reminding us that while so much changes, too much remains the same.

Ninety-eight years is a grand old age for a person; it is only a fraction in the lifetime of a nation.

We are such a young nation so recently removed from slavery that only my father's generation stands between Julian Bond and human bondage; I am the grandson of a slave, as are many in this nation.

My grandfather, James Bond, was born in 1863, in Kentucky; freedom didn't come for him until the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865.

He and his mother were property, like a horse or a chair. As a young girl, she had been given away as a wedding present to a new bride, and when that bride became pregnant, her husband -- that's my great-grandmother's owner and master -- exercised his right to take his wife's slave as his mistress.

That union produced two children, one of them my grandfather.

At age 15, barely able to read and write, he hitched his tuition -- a steer -- to a rope and walked across Kentucky to Berea College and the college took him in.

When my grandfather graduated from Berea, in 1892, the college asked him to deliver the commencement address.

He said then:

The pessimist from his corner looks out on the world of wickedness and sin, and blinded by all that is good or hopeful in the condition and progress of the human race, bewails the present state of affairs and predicts woeful things for the future.

.

In every cloud he beholds a destructive storm, in every flash of lightning an omen of evil, and in every shadow that falls across his path a lurking foe.

He forgets that the clouds also bring life and hope, that lightning purifies the atmosphere, that shadow and darkness prepare for sunshine and growth, and that hardships and adversity nerve the race, as the individual, for greater efforts and grander victories.

In the first years of the 21st Century, we have been tested, as an organization and as a nation, by "hardships and adversity." If my grandfather was right, we are now poised for "greater efforts and grander victories."

We've experienced some real losses at the NAACP in recent months. We lost our CEO, who couldn't align our mission with his. We've lost more than 70 valuable employees because of the downsizing our finances forced upon us.

But we know if we cannot bear the cross, we cannot wear the crown.

The NAACP will emerge from this period healthier than we were before. The right-sizing process, as painful as it is for those most affected, forces us to be leaner, meaner, and keener …

Our programs are continuing, our purpose and commitment are strong, our dedication to justice is unwavering.

We are poised for "greater efforts and grander victories."

So is our nation. Already, our democracy is healthier than it was last year …

What happened on Election Day last November was not an election -- it was an intervention! …

President Bush has seen his presidency repudiated, from the natural disaster of Katrina -- to which he did not respond -- to the disaster in Iraq which he created.

The extent of the repudiation was evident late last month when the immigration reform bill, the centerpiece of the Administration's domestic legislative hopes, died in the Senate. On the procedural vote that determined the bill's fate, only 12 of the Senate's 49 Republicans stood with the President. When Bush came to shove, his own party members pushed back.

The demise of the immigration measure was widely interpreted to mean the Administration's domestic agenda is likely finished. With his approval rating hovering below the freezing mark, most Americans seem to wish the Bush presidency were finished.

The damage done, at home and abroad, is immense.

There is no better way to examine the state of race in Bush's America than to examine Katrina and the lessons it has to teach us.

Imagine a major hurricane hits New Orleans. Within hours the President of the United States is on Air Force One headed for the stricken city. Upon landing in the no-electricity darkness, with a flashlight held to his face, he announces, "This is the President of the United States and I'm here to help you!"

The year was 1965. The President, Lyndon Johnson.

Forty years later a more devastating hurricane strikes New Orleans. Neither the President nor any other federal official is there to help. The city would sustain lasting damage -- and so would the President.

Thousands would be stranded, and they would be overwhelmingly black and poor. That was horrendous enough. Even worse was that it would take five days before meaningful help would arrive. Some would say, with no apology to Clarence Thomas, that we witnessed a modern-day lynching.

In 1935, my parents were living in Louisiana when a neighbor's cousin, Jerome Wilson, was lynched. Writing about the lynching, my father "stopped short of arguing that lynching was a deliberate effort to dispossess black landholders. … He did show, however, that lynching could destroy the work of several generations in a single day."

The same, of course, could be said of Katrina. A case in point is New Orleans' Lower Ninth Ward. The Lower Ninth, one of the most heavily damaged areas of the city, was almost exclusively black. Although its poverty rate was higher than the city as a whole, so was its rate of home ownership. Almost 60 percent of the Lower Ninth's residents owned their own homes, compared with 47 percent in the city as a whole, partly as a result of homes being passed down through generations in this deeply rooted community.

Now, as it appears increasingly likely that the Lower Ninth Ward will not be rebuilt, it can be said that Katrina, like lynching, not only "destroy[ed] the work of generations in a single day," but is resulting in "a deliberate effort to dispossess black landholders."

We should bear in mind that Katrina did not occur in a vacuum. The Gulf War was not removed from the Gulf Coast. Katrina served to underscore how the war in Iraq has weakened, rather than strengthened, our defenses, including our levees.

The problem isn't that we cannot prosecute a war in the Persian Gulf and protect our citizens on the Gulf Coast at home. The problem is that we cannot do either one.

They used September 11th as an excuse to wage war in Iraq. They used the hurricane to wash away decent pay for workers and for minority - and women-owned businesses. They are turning the recovery over to the same no-bid corporate looters who are profiting from the disaster of Iraq.

They boasted that they wanted to make the government so small it would drown in a bathtub -- and in New Orleans, it did.

This is the first lesson that emerges from Katrina -- it teaches us the consequences of anti-government government, under which government's role in protecting its people is limited or destroyed and government is used exclusively to wage war and protect and defend corporate interests.

One of the other lessons, all of which are interconnected, is the highlighting of the racial and class divide in this country. Although New Orleans was unique in many ways -- music, cuisine, culture -- its race and class issues were the norm and not the exception.

And finally, Katrina resulted in a loss of moral authority for the United States, at home and abroad. Americans were not the only ones who watched Katrina's disaster unfold on television. The images were seen around the world. If we at home felt revulsion and shame, imagine what our enemies abroad thought -- or even our friends. It is reminiscent of the role segregation played in international politics. …

As survivors floundered and bodies floated in New Orleans' streets, neither "civilized" nor "secure" described our democratic form of government. And viewers, here and around the globe, wondered: where was that government in the time of these citizens' greatest need?

The Administration's response to Hurricane Katrina was a gumbo of inaction, insensitivity and incompetence.

The Administration's indifference led rapper Kanye West, days after the hurricane, to famously remark, on live television, "George Bush doesn't like black people."

His comment was not off-the-cuff. It was premeditated and preceded by the following:

I hate the way they portray us in the media. You see a black family, it says, 'They're looting.' You see a white family, it says, 'They're looking for food.' And you know it's been five days [waiting for federal help] because most of the people are black.

Political scientist Michael Dawson and two colleagues surveyed blacks and whites as to whether West's remarks were unjustified. Only 9 percent of blacks answered "yes" compared to 56 percent of whites. This follows a pattern.

Dr. Dawson also asked whether the government's response would have been faster if the victims had been white. Eighty-four percent of blacks said "yes" while only 20 percent of whites agreed. Similarly, in a Newsweek poll, twice as many blacks as whites -- 65 percent versus 31 percent -- thought the government responded slowly because the victims were black.

When Dawson asked whether Katrina showed that racial inequality remains a major problem in the United States, 90 percent of blacks answered "yes" while only 38 percent of whites thought so.

These responses are consistent with a much larger black/white divide: "nearly four-fifths of blacks (78 percent) believe that blacks will either never or not in their lifetimes achieve racial equality in the United States. On the other hand, nearly two-thirds of whites (66%) believe that blacks have either achieved or will soon achieve racial equality."

Life was not easy in the Big Easy for Lower Niners and other blacks before Katrina. Four in ten black families lived in poverty, the highest rate in the nation for blacks living in cities. The majority of these subsisted on incomes less than half the official poverty level.

In the region affected by Katrina, more than one million lived in poverty before the storm. Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama are, respectively, the first, second, and eighth poorest states in the union.

Poverty in the United States is not confined to the South, of course. Today, 37 million Americans live in poverty. They represent about 13 percent of the population -- the highest percentage in the developed world. Their number has grown since 2001, with more than 5 million people having slipped below the poverty line during the Bush Administration.

And the gap has grown between the haves and the have-nots. The top 20 percent of earners take over half the national income, while the bottom 20 percent get just 3.4 percent. Black Americans, of course, are more likely to be among the bottom-earners than the top. Almost a quarter of black Americans nationwide live below the poverty line as compared to only 8.6 percent of whites.

Almost every social indicator, from birth to death, reflects black-white disparities. Infant mortality rates are 146 percent higher for blacks; chances of imprisonment are 447 percent higher; rate of death by homicide 521 percent higher; lack of health insurance 42 percent more likely; the proportion with a college degree 60 percent lower. And the average white American will live 5 years longer than the average black American.

Media images during the Katrina coverage made it obvious that the dying and the suffering were predominantly black and poor. Though some wanted to engage in a "race or class" debate, even President Bush acknowledged that they are intertwined.

In his Jackson Square speech, the President spoke of the "deep, persistent poverty" which exists in our country. "That poverty," he said, "has its roots in a history of racial discrimination."

The truth is that race trumps class. As Michael Dyson has written, "[c]oncentrated poverty doesn't victimize poor whites in the same way it does poor blacks." That is why "[c]omparisons between poor whites and poor blacks in New Orleans … clearly showed that poor whites were much better off overall." It is why "[t]he public school system served poor whites better than poor blacks; poor white children were less likely to attend schools in areas of concentrated poverty." It is why three times as many poor blacks as poor whites lacked access to a vehicle.

W.E.B. DuBois, one of the founders of the NAACP, was the first social theorist to link class to race. He understood then what we must understand now: "race never stands apart from economic realities."

In fact, race, in this circumstance and many others, is the crucial variable that proves that not all differences are equal.

Present day inequality and racial disparities are cumulative. They are the result of racial advantages compounded over time -- and they "produce racialized patterns of accumulation and disaccumulation. As a result, racial inequality is imbedded into the fabric of post-civil rights movement American society."

Today's apologists argue that discrimination against minorities is not a problem; society has to protect itself from discrimination against the majority instead.

It might have been proper yesterday, they maintain, to aim big guns at racism, at segregated jobs, schools and ballot boxes. The ills we face today, they say, are crime, teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency and family disintegration. These call, they claim, for new approaches and abandoning government's help.

But poverty's symptoms must not be confused with poverty's causes. …

We ought to use the lessons of Katrina to recapture the race issue from the political right, to return to a time when whites say, as President Johnson did in 1965, "[t]heir cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice."

In the past, Americans came to agree on guaranteeing blacks' right to vote and to integrate public places; they disagree strongly today, however, on both the wisdom of and techniques required for extending equality beyond these public spheres, and many even dispute whether anti-black bias still persists.

Many Americans maintain -- from corporate and government sponsored pulpits, newspaper op-ed pages and television and radio talk shows -- that racial discrimination is an ancient artifact. Most of the people saying this are white, but some blacks have drunk the Kool-Aid too.

Thus the '70s, '80s and '90s are now defined as a bias-free present where white supremacy has been vanquished, and black disadvantage is rooted in black misbehavior, where culture, not color, is at fault.

At the NAACP, we know this is not true, and that's why we are dedicated to an aggressive campaign of social justice, fighting racial discrimination. We've done this in the past and will continue to do it in the future.

We have much more work to do.

Julian Bond has been Chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors since February 1998. He is a Distinguished Scholar in the School of Government at American University in Washington, DC, and a Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

Posted by the Asbury Park Press on 07/23/07

BY EDWARD IWATA
GANNETT NEWS SERVICE

NEW YORK — The seasoned banker from Rhode Island and the junior banker from Brazil seemed to be worlds apart on the surface. But when Merrill Lynch managing director Kerry Cannella and young associate Selma Bueno joined forces on their first deal, they made a potent cross-cultural duo.

Merrill Lynch was representing Brazilian investors selling their stake in a multibillion-dollar Latin American company to potential U.S. investors. The deal was moving slowly, with both sides cautious.

Then Cannella and Bueno stepped up the pace. They jetted between New York and Brazil many times. Bueno analyzed financial papers in Portuguese. She put together an offering document for investors. She picked classy hotels and restaurants, translated during negotiations and made both sides feel more at ease with each other.

With the help of Bueno's business and social skills, the bankers finally closed the deal — in the hundreds of millions of dollars — to everyone's satisfaction.

"Selma and I were a perfect match," Cannella says. "She bridged the gaps between the U.S. party, the Brazilian party and me."

Most Merrill Lynch deals today involve an international party, which makes a diverse global work force a must. Merrill Lynch boasts 740 offices in 37 countries, with non-U.S. revenue making up 54 percent of the total revenue of its global markets and investment banking group.

"The world is getting much smaller," Cannella says. "Borders basically don't exist anymore."

In past years, many U.S. companies lost their way in a business Babel, where international work forces are as likely to speak Spanish, Hindi or Mandarin as they do English. Today, though, as more multinationals race into the global economy, they're tailoring their diversity policies and practices to the new cultural and business order to a greater degree than ever before.

Like cultural chameleons, they're adapting to hundreds of countries, languages and religious practices. They're juggling more cross-border teams on all continents. They're recruiting and hiring diverse talent from Shanghai to Mumbai, India.

"Diversity is at the heart of globalization," says Douglas Freeman, CEO of Virtcom Consulting, a diversity-consulting firm in New York. "It's happening across economies on a global scale, and it will only grow in the future."

A must for business

For most companies, global diversity is a business imperative. "The speed of global business is accelerating diversity," says Pauline Ning Brody, former director of global sales at Colgate-Palmolive and a diversity consultant born in Shanghai who speaks several Chinese dialects. "All business processes cut across country borders now, with virtual teams in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia."

During a recent diversity conference at the United Nations here co-hosted by Virtcom, the world's economy was reflected by a m ilange of 400 diversity experts: Latino, African-American and Asian-Indian executives. Human resource managers from Hungary. A white male consultant from South Africa. A Hawaiian educator launching a college business diversity program.

One big theme that arose during the lively panels: how U.S.-style diversity, historically focused on compliance with federal hiring mandates, is evolving into a broader global version of a multilingual, cross-cultural work force linked to strategic business goals.

"The world economy is changing dramatically," says Andres Tapia, chief diversity officer at consulting firm Hewitt Associates, "and so is the definition of diversity."

U.S. corporations are diving into global diversity by:

Going native. Diversity managers say that U.S. multinationals are growing more savvy and knowledgeable about native cultures and traditions in other nations. Instead of storming into a region and risking a backlash, corporations seek to gain the trust of locals and forge partnerships.

At Weyerhaeuser, the $23 billion timber giant with operations in 18 countries, executives hire and work with native people in Canada, Uruguay, New Zealand and elsewhere.

Over the years, Weyerhaeuser has faced lawsuits and protests from environmentalists and Canada's aboriginals, known as First Nations people. But the company has hired hundreds of aboriginal people at its wood-products plants, signed on aboriginal suppliers and contractors and forged several logging joint ventures with the tribes that have since been sold.

"Our goal," says Weyerhaeuser spokesman Frank Mendizabal, "is to have good relationships with the aboriginal people, to be aware of their concerns and to understand their cultures."

Recognizing religious differences. As multinational companies hire more religiously diverse employees in the United States and other countries, they're wrestling with how to adapt their workplaces to employees of all faiths, including Muslims, Jews and Christians.

Texas Instruments, American Express, Hewlett-Packard, Ford Motor and many other companies let workers form religion-based employee networks for support and networking. Some corporations offer chapels or prayer rooms for employees or give their workers time off to worship on special religious days, from the Jewish Sabbath to the Muslim holy day of Friday.

"Religion is the next big megatrend to emerge in diversity, and companies understand they have to deal with it," said Georgette Bennett, president of the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in New York.

At IBM, Bennett said, when security was tightened after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, diversity managers came up with a clever solution for a Muslim employee who wore her veil to work. Since observant Muslim women do not show their faces to men outside their families, IBM issued the employee two identification cards. One featured her photograph with a veil, to show to male security guards. The other card had her picture without the veil, to be shown only to female security officers.

Cross-border networking. In earlier years, "affinity groups" — women, ethnic and gay employee groups — were social networks and support groups for employees who may have felt like outcasts.

But now companies from Procter & Gamble to Lehman Bros. and others are tapping into the groups as powerful cross-cultural tools for hiring and recruiting, employee and management training and other business endeavors.

At John Deere, the 170-year-old agricultural equipment company in Moline, Ill., more than half of its 47,000 employees are based outside the United States in Latin America, Asia, Russia and other regions.

The company has 20 affinity groups from Finland to Mexico, and, "The groups must be tied to a business objective of the company," says Deborah Taylor, director of global diversity. To that end, John Deere uses the worldwide networks to find and retain talent.

"If you're sitting in Moline and trying to put together a global strategy, you're in a lose-lose situation" unless you fully connect with employees and affinity groups worldwide, Taylor says.

Finding global talent. With torrid economic growth in China, India and Russia, the global work force in the 1980s doubled to 3 billion by 2000, according to research by Harvard University economist Richard Freeman.

Multinationals know they can no longer rely solely on the U.S. hiring pool, where the growth rate of engineering and science students has slowed. That means the hunt is on for international talent. Now recruiters from Fortune 500 companies are courting top management, financial, engineering and sales talent at elite universities in Asia, Europe and Latin America.

"Before, companies could pick and choose who to recruit," says Effenus Henderson, chief diversity officer at Weyerhaeuser. "Now, if we truly want to attract the best and the brightest, we've got to look at immigrants around the world."

Why is global diversity getting hotter? More capital, labor and business ideas are flowing around the world than ever before. Whether anti-trade forces like it or not, economic power is steadily shifting abroad, say diversity managers and consultants. And U.S. companies seeking double-digit revenue growth are looking to emerging nations with fast-growing industries and middle-class consumers.

Obstacles to movement

Companies face many obstacles, though, including anti-American backlash, stronger competition for talent from foreign companies and the sheer complexity of doing business overseas. Another problem: the failure of myopic companies to see that diversity strategies must be multifaceted enough to work around the world.

China sees sharp regional and dialect differences. Latin American countries may focus more on class and income-level distinctions among people. In Japan, businesses worry about the age and knowledge gap between older salarymen and younger generations.

Gender issues in the workplace also vary widely. The Scandinavian countries of Norway, Sweden and Denmark have strong workplace policies for women and mothers, while some Third World countries treat women workers harshly.

"One size does not fit all," says Anita Zanchettin, director of diversity at consultant Aperian Global and author of "Global Diversity: Winning Customers and Engaging Employees Within World Markets." "It's a very different reality in every country . . . the business environment, the languages, the needs of the marketplace and consumers."

Companies must adapt more quickly than ever before to overseas cultures and regions. The European Union alone has 27 nation-states with dozens of languages and 500 million people.

Freeman at Virtcom Consulting says that corporations active in the Czech Republic, for instance, must seek ways to integrate into their work forces the Roma Gypsies, an impoverished and segregated ethnic group. The group is protected by the European Union's Article 13, a legal directive that bans discrimination by race, age, gender, religion, sexual orientation and disabilities.

In South Africa, a fast-growing economy, government affirmative action-style programs and a constitution that bans racial and sex discrimination have given diversity a huge boost in the past decade, says Alan Richter, president of QED Consulting in New York and a native South African. "The diversity agenda for businesses is booming," Richter says. "South Africa is the economic superpower of Africa and one of the most diverse countries in the world, and the black middle class — known as 'black diamonds' — grew 30 percent last year."

At the U.N. conference, executives on one panel struggled to define the new global diversity. Finally, they laughed and shook their heads at the colossal scope of their mission. "If we succeed, we'll change the world," said Floyd Pitts, senior director of diversity at Hilton Hotels and an African-American. "Just not tomorrow."

Diversity pays off for everyone

By Joanna L. Krotz - Microsoft Small Business Center

Business owners, it's time to do more than just pay lip service to diversity. In case you haven't noticed, every state in America now hosts multicultural communities.

Whether you translate diversity into African-American, Asian-American, disabled, ethnic, female, gay, immigrant, Latino, minority, Native American, seniors, special needs, urban -- or any other group besides so-called mainstream white male -- rainbow demographics are a fact of business life.

This is dramatically spelled out in a recent U.S. Department of Labor report, called "Futurework: Trends and Challenges for Work in the 21st Century":

"By 2050, the U.S. population is expected to increase by 50% and minority groups will make up nearly half of the population. Immigration will account for almost two-thirds of the nation's population growth. The population of older Americans is expected to more than double. One-quarter of all Americans will be of Hispanic origin. Almost one in 10 Americans will be of Asian or Pacific Islander descent. And more women and people with disabilities will be on the job."

What does this mean to you? Any company that wants to stay competitive must come to terms with diversity -- inside and outside the organization.

Of course, the legal and moral arguments for diversity are unassailable. Discriminatory hiring practices not only demean the human spirit, they've been against the law for decades. Nonetheless, employers have been notoriously slow to change.

No one thought much about making the business case for diverse employment until reports of the changing workforce and consumer demographics added up to a new math.

At the same time, social and political policies like "minority quotas" and "affirmative action" turned controversial for advocates and critics alike, and even ran afoul of the law, as with university admissions polices.

Nowadays, global corporations are busy recruiting diverse work groups because of profit motives. It's good for business. Small and mid-tier firms would be smart to follow that example.

Here are five key business reasons to hire a diverse staff.

1. All business is now international. There's no such thing as a local company anymore. "The Internet has influenced all commerce," says Ilene Wasserman, founder of the ICW Consulting Group in Penn Valley, Pa. "I may be a Mom and Pop shop, but I can't afford a localized or provincial attitude about what we carry and serve."

Every business, whether small-town retailer or international marketer must be savvy about the future generations and how we will trade goods and services across national borders and in multiple languages.

2. Conflict is a good thing. Small-business owners may hesitate to hire qualified candidates different than themselves or the rest of the staff because of worries about resulting tension. But think about it. New ideas only emerge from friction and need. Innovation only arises out of conflict. Comfort zones are hardly the birthplaces of creativity. Plus, a company's values and culture begin at the top.

"Small businesses often grow up around a founder and lots of family members," says management consultant Adrian Savage, author of "A Spark from Heaven." "It's hard for outsiders to come into such a cozy environment. You either fit in with them or you don't fit in at all. But that makes the resulting business extremely inflexible." Diverse groups of people, points out Savage, will have better antenna to see opportunities that you will miss.

3. Small pools run dry. With competition fierce and markets international, why narrow your search for skilled help to shallow areas of the talent pool? "We often hire people because we 'like' them," says attorney Carol Merchasin, managing director at Morgan Lewis law firm in Philadelphia. "And we 'like' them because they look like us." Instead, suggests Merchasin, take away the screen of 'liking.' Focus on precise skills, competencies and experience to do the job you need done.

While you're at it, evaluate your preconceived notions. For example, Joyce Bender runs a technology consulting company, which partners with larger firms to provide employment for people with disabilities.

She often faces the perception that workers with disabilities are "sick" or "absent" a lot. The reality? "I offer a $400 bonus to workers each year who don't miss a day of work. And I can't tell you how many bonuses I've given to employees who haven't missed a day of work in five years. People with disabilities have to overcome obstacles and discrimination. They have to figure out how to get into and out of buildings. They've been in tough situations and it's made them flexible problem solvers. They're really good workers for small businesses."

4. Diversity drives sales. Nearly 80% of Fortune 500 companies now have some kind of diversity efforts in place, says Fred Miller in his book, "The Inclusion Breakthrough: Unleashing the Real Power of Diversity." Increasingly, government and corporate vendors will contract only with suppliers that can demonstrate "cultural readiness," according to Miller.

"The world is changing," says Miller, who runs the Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group in Troy, N.Y. "If it's not on your doorstep now, it will be soon. You can't wait. Reaction time must be instantaneous."

5. Stable staffs are cost-effective. Suzanne and James Faustlin purchased their Tucson, Ariz., franchise for the Maids Home Service in the late 1990s. The business then had 13 employees and $250,000 in revenues, says Suzanne. Within a few years, the couple had grown the staff to 34 and revenues to $750,000.

Like many home cleaning services, the staff is all female and more than 50% minority, in this case Hopi Native American and Hispanic. But unlike many such services, the Faustlins play up the cultural differences. "We think it's fun and the uniqueness of the traditions is an advantage," says Suzanne.

Every workday starts with an early potluck breakfast. "We get tamales from different types of corn and Hopi blue marble bread," she says. "We encourage intermingling of the teams. It's a way to deal with the stresses." Suzanne says the staff also celebrates many different holidays.

She credits those management policies with low staff turnover and easier recruitment. "We encourage employees to refer people and we offer a finder's fee." The result: A very stable staff. "We have several family members working together."

Creating an inclusive company culture that values and respects individual difference is likely to yield tangible, bottom-line results. "Nobody can afford a work force that doesn't contribute its best work," Miller says. "Why settle for a sprint when you can win the marathon?"

Joanna L. Krotz writes about small-business marketing and management issues. She is the co-author of the "Microsoft Small Business Kit" and runs Muse2Muse Productions, a New York City-based custom publisher.

Age: Labor Force Participation Increasing Among Those Over 55

A study released on June 12^{th says more Americans age 55 and older are now working longer. Interesting this group is primarily women. The study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute uses the most recent Census Bureau data on U.S. labor-force participation and found that post-World War II baby boomers are continuing to work because of their growing responsibility for paying retirement expenses. http://www.ebri.org/pdf/EBRI_Notes_06-2007.pdf}

The trend of workers retiring at later ages than in the past has been on the rise since 1993, EBRI said. "Many of today's older Americans appear to be motivated by a desire to work longer, and they are likely to continue in the work force as jobs remain available to them" according to the report.

The study also found that women are almost exclusively driving the increase in those 55 and older who are continuing to work; the male rate of participation is flat to declining. Those with higher levels of education also are continuing in the workforce longer than those with lower levels.

The report, "Labor Force Participation: The Population Age 55 and Older" is online at:

“Companies that increase the number of women in leadership roles have a competitive advantage,” say Robin Cohen and Linda Kornfeld, managing partners of the Dickstein Shapiro law firm’s New York and Los Angeles offices, respectively. Cohen and Kornfeld note several studies that support their point. A 28-year study of 215 Fortune 500 firms found that those with greater numbers of female executives outperformed the median companies in their fields by 18% to 69% in “profits as a percentage of revenue, assets and stockholders’ equity.” The pair also observes that a review of 353 Fortune 500 firms by the research organization Catalyst found “a 35% advantage in return on equity and a 34% advantage in total return to shareholders” for firms with more women in senior leadership. Research by the University of California/Davis and the University of Delaware also confirmed better financial performance by companies with greater proportions of women in top management, Cohen and Kornfeld report. (Barron’s [Cohen and Kornfeld], September 4, 2006, p. 37)

New Global Diversity Report by ILO:

On May 10, the International Labor Organization published its second global workplace report entitled “Equality at Work: Tackling the Challenge.”  The report provides a global picture of job-related discrimination, citing both progress and failures in the struggle to fight discrimination ranging from traditional forms such as sex, race or religion, to newer forms based on age, sexual orientation, HIV/AIDS status and disability.  The report says that despite major advances in fighting discrimination at work, mounting inequalities in income and opportunities and significant and persistent forms of workplace discrimination are causing growing concern.

http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/@dgreports/@dcomm/@webdev/documents/publication/wcms_082607.pdf