Article 4

What Can We Learn from Texaco?

"...the programs that we had in place were simply not enough."
Peter I. Bijur, CEO, Texaco, CNN, Nov. 17, 1996

"I doubt that anyone astute enough to rise to the top of a major
corporation really believes that diversity workshops are the way to
get blacks and whites to work together with mutual respect."
Glenn C. Loury, New York Times, Nov. 24, 1996

The settlement was the easy part.

Texaco's plan of November 15 reflects what it should have been doing all along:

create an Equality and Tolerance Task Force. Adopt and implement company-wide diversity and sensitivity, mentoring, and ombuds programs. Increase the number of people of color in senior positions, do more business with minority vendors, and have more minority franchisees. Monitor its performance.

So what else is new?

It cost them $115 million up front to come up with this plan. This is more than most consultants would have charged. It is more than a subscription to this publication-- and all those steps have been advocated in these pages for years.

You could go to your CEO and point out how much you could save by adopting a variation of Texaco's plan. You could be a hero.

Avis and Shell are next. (They may be settled by the time you read this.)

And how many more corporate scandals are out there? How many more minutes of meeting with senior managers speaking their minds?

Just as the Army set up a hotline to hear about sexual assault and abuse after the Aberdeen Proving Grounds story, I have set up a hotline to hear about diversity abuses, excuses, misuse, or nonuse--1-800-827-1783. I am especially interested in any tape recordings you may have.

Texaco and every U.S. corporation must (in the words of Cornel West in another context) "disinvest in white supremacy, disinvest in male supremacy."

Those Texaco managers seem to have been hypocritical about endorsing diversity, diversity training, diversity speeches, diversity policies. They didn't talk as though they thought much of those programs, policies, and initiatives.

It's another devastating setback for white men. Most white men in the workforce have been trying to distance themselves from being associated with blatant racism. Now we hear executives in a global, multinational, Fortune 25, $38 billion corporation who talk trash, not different from the worst caricatures of crackers and rednecks. (One newspaper cartoon showed a man in a KKK hood pumping gas at a Texaco station.) Plus shredding documents. This is Oliver North and Mark Fuhrman, at the top of corporate America; this is your worst nightmare.

It comes as no surprise to many people who are not white.

So this is a critique of the tactics of gradualism and the business-as-usual approach of diversity efforts. It's obvious that some corporations are not only not ready for Workforce 2000, they're not ready for Brown v. Board of Education, 1954.

After a zillion training sessions, we're not even close to being sensitive and aware, it seems, or to doing something with our newfound sensitivity and awareness in the executive suite.

Of course, it's appalling. But it's worse than that. It's a wake-up call for Texaco, they say. I say it's also a wake-up call for the diversity movement.

--published in MANAGING DIVERSITY, January 1997

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