Diversity is good business. Kobach makes a direct threat to companies practicing it | Opinion

It’s not new info that diverse teams are higher achieving, or that hiring with that fact in mind is a good business decision.

A 2016 Harvard Business Review piece about the extensive research into why that’s the case, headlined, ‘Why Diverse Teams Are Smarter,’ cited a 2015 McKinsey report on 366 public companies that found that those in the top quartile for ethnic and racial diversity in management were 35% more likely to have financial returns above their industry mean.

Yet Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach is leading a coalition of Republican attorneys general threatening “serious legal consequences” against Fortune 100 companies acting on that information.

On Thursday, Kobach and Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti sent a letter to all Fortune 100 CEOs, also signed by Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey and 10 other Republican AGs. In it, they warn that they’ll come after companies that continue to consider race and diversity, equity and inclusion in their hiring practices.

Why, exactly, should companies disadvantage themselves in this way?

Because, according to Kobach’s letter, the Supreme Court’s recent decision striking down affirmative action in universities means that all race-based hiring practices violate federal employment discrimination laws.

For decades — really, ever since the Dixiecrats opposed to civil rights legislation fled to the GOP and our two major parties traded places on race — Republicans have been arguing in various ways that the only systemic racism that exists in the United States of America disadvantages white people.

“We urge you to immediately cease any unlawful race-based quotas or preferences your company has adopted for its employment and contracting practices,” the letter says. “If you choose not to do so, know that you will be held accountable — sooner rather than later — for your decision to continue treating people differently because of the color of their skin.”

“Such overt and pervasive racial discrimination in the employment and contracting practices of Fortune 100 companies compels us to remind you of the obvious: Racial discrimination is both immoral and illegal.”

Ignores Martin Luther King Jr. on discrimination, poverty

Yes, it’s cherry-on-sundae time, using the words of Martin Luther King Jr., yet again, to argue against racial justice, no matter that in all cases, righting historical and also very much current-day wrongs happens to make practical sense.

“All Americans should be judged based on the content of their character, not the color of their skin,” Kobach said, quoting from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Never quoted from that same speech by Republican radicals — we have stopped calling them conservatives, because they aren’t that — is King’s observation that a century after the Emancipation Proclamation, “the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.”

While Kobach’s fellow Republican, Alabama Sen. Tommy Tuberville, normalizes white nationalism without any fear of Jesus or his constituents, we think of these much less soothing words from MLK: “Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.” No less true today, unfortunately.

And why is it never acknowledged that race-conscious hiring helps us all? Not only because diverse teams make fewer mistakes, but because as King also said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2023 at 5:06 AM.