Sam’s Club CEO Rosalind Brewer “is being accused of discriminating against white men following a CNN interview where she discussed the importance of workforce diversity”:
Brewer was asked by the interviewer how she promotes diversity within her company.
“It has to start with top leadership,” Brewer said. “My executive team is very diverse and I make that a priority. I demand it within my team.”
She said she mentors women inside and outside of her company, as well, and also encourages Sam’s Club’s partners to hire a more diverse workforce. . . .
“Just today we met with a supplier and the entire other side of the table was all Caucasian males. That was interesting. I decided not to talk about it directly with [the supplier’s] folks in the room because there were actually no female, like, levels down. So I’m going to place a call to him.”
Critics are claiming that Brewer’s remarks are evidence that she advocates against employing and hiring white men — even though four of the eight people on her executive team are white men. Some customers are now accusing Brewer of being “racist” toward white men and are threatening to boycott Sam’s Club.
You can read the whole thing, and you can also read Steve Berman’s commentary at Red State, which begins: “Nobody argues against the fact that there needs to be diversity at the top of large companies, but . . .”
Uh, what?
Is it a “fact” that “diversity at the top” is a “need”? I am skeptical. Why should anyone care whether the executive suite is “diverse”? Are the Japanese executives at Toyota worried? And why does Steve Berman limit this “diversity” requirement to “large companies”?
How large does a company have to be before the “need” for “diversity at the top” becomes a “fact”? If a family of Mexican immigrants opens a taco stand, should they be required to hire a Korean assistant manager for the sake of “diversity”? Does anyone complain there are “too many” Italians working at the pizza restaurant?
Businesses exist for exactly one reason, to make profit. Anything that contributes to the goal of making profit is good, and anything that distracts from that goal is bad. Period.
Companies do not exist for the sake for the employees. Nobody has a “right” to a job at any company, because if the company does not make profit, the company will go bankrupt and then everybody will be unemployed. Your employment is therefore a function of your daily contributions to the goal of making profit.
Where do people get these crazy ideas that business should have some other goal beyond profit? It’s “democracy,” stupid.
People believe that, because we live under a democratic form of government, everything should be democratic. American parents sometimes encourage this foolish belief, kowtowing to the whims of toddlers and allowing their children to question parental authority. Do the kids want whole-grain cereal and juice for breakfast, or Pop-Tarts and chocolate milk? Let’s have a referendum!
Our education system is also increasingly “democratic” this way, as demonstrated by the puerile tantrums of overgrown toddlers at Yale University and other campuses run by mobs rule.
Democracy becomes anarchy, a free-for-all where everything is up for grabs, because the basis of authority is always uncertain, and people believe they are entitled to have a vote about everything, and believe they are “oppressed” if anything — whether it’s their job, their school or their marriage — doesn’t perfectly fit their own plans and wishes.
Where legitimate authority is uncertain or disputed, we find what Hobbes called bellum omnium contra omnes (“the war of all against all”), and the identity-politics mentality of “diversity” is symptomatic of this societal drift toward anarchy. Why should anyone care that the CEO of Sam’s Club is a black woman? And why should she care whether the suppliers are white males? Sam’s Club exists to make profit, as do the companies that manufacture the products that are sold at Sam’s Club, and as long as everybody is making profit, so what? The people who are calling for a boycott of Sam’s Club are reflecting the same mentality as those who want to boycott Donald Trump’s businesses because they don’t like Trump’s opinions on immigration. The idea that everything is political — that everything should always be up for a vote or otherwise subject to political influence — and that we are victims of “social injustice” if things don’t go our way, must ultimately lead to anarchy and civil war. Permit me to remind readers of a valuable lesson:
Life is often unfair. People wrongly suffer harm through no fault of their own, and if we allow ourselves to sulk over the harms we’ve suffered, we will never accomplish anything useful in life. Some people go through life reacting to every failure by saying, “It’s not my fault,” and blaming others for their problems. We call these people losers or, if they convert their self-pity to political ideology, we call them “activists.” Life is unfair, says the loser, and this unfairness is social injustice, and therefore we must rearrange the world to make life better for the losers.
Don’t be a loser. Don’t be the kind of grievance-mongering “activist” who devotes your life to the political ideology of self-pity. And don’t let your kids vote on what to have for breakfast.
P.S.: Shop our Amazon links for Christmas deals because . . . profit!
No business has any need for diversity anywhere in its ranks. It needs competence, and that is color blind.
Anything Salem purchases ends up moving towards the left. Red State has been no exception.
I have to say I agree with QM up there.
Competence is absolutely necessary.
I don’t care about skin color when it comes to my doctor or my mechanic. I just need to know that they can do their job.
Insisting on diversity is just another form of tokenism.
“The people who are calling for a boycott of Sam’s Club are reflecting the same mentality as those who want to boycott Donald Trump’s businesses because they don’t like Trump’s opinions on immigration.”
On the other hand, the people who refuse to see that there must be a price for the attitudes and actions of the people running the corporation, and instead turn their guns on the people who are trying to impose a price, might as well be openly fighting for the other side.
“The idea that everything is political – that everything should always be up for a vote or otherwise subject to political influence – and that we are victims of “social injustice” if things don’t go our way, must ultimately lead to anarchy and civil war.”
We already have a civil war … and conservatives are losing because they generally refuse to see it, or seeing ot, refuse to fight. And this is partly because they already accept the basic premises of the other side; they just don’t yet want to go everywhere the logic of those premises demands we go.
I hit your Amazon a couple of weeks ago
I disagree. Trump’s opinions are based on law and opposing Muslim ideology. This racist woman’s opinions are based on the idea whites default to a racist supremacist ideology and that no demographic spike of either whites or men is accidental or random. That is biological hatred and what the word “diversity” has come to represent.
“People believe that, because we live under a democratic form of government,….”
“People” keep using that word…..
Working on the floor of a freezer warehouse – the place your frozen foods come from – is one of the more miserable jobs in America. I have never seen a woman on the floor of a freezer warehouse. Something tells me she will not demand diversity there. Her logic demands we imagine men wish to keep that misery all to themselves.
I will be honest and state that I have ceased to take the opinions of women – especially feminists – seriously. The simple reason for that is they cannot back them up; they can demand nothing. When they wish their demands and expectations backed up they call on the very forces of “toxic masculinity” they reject: men with guns, bloody men, men who fight and train for war; in other words – me. In a world without the very laws which by feminist definitions I created, women can demand nothing from me. I in turn can demand anything from them. Women live and even thrive on the sufferance and achievements of men. Women have become disconnected from this truth, and therefore reality. I am reality. Eat that feminists.
…spoken like a true representative of a predatory company.
“Diversity” means I need to be less respectful of her position as CEO of a large company because she’s black and a woman. Why? Because, for all I know, she elevated to this position because of her gender and race, for “diversity” sake. A white man with an equal position or credentials deserves more respect because he could not have been given a piggy-back ride for his physical birth attributes.
This is racial equality?
Singapore, lots of diversity, very successful. Yay!
Japan and South Korea, no diversity, very successful. Ummmm…
Yugoslavia, lots of diversity, and… er, deceased. In fact, killed by diversity.
Diversity is meaningless. It is or it isn’t. And regarding success, it’s as valuable as hair color or handedness or shoe size. People who make it a priority are signalling that they not only lack competence but cannot recognize it, let alone explain why it is important.
Watch for Sam’s Club to start sliding downwards now. And the worse it gets the more frantically they will demand diversity.
Wow.
That’s what drives me nuts. Diversity is not a goal. It is a fact. It is a complication of business that we must work around. Who wants a large corporation where all the workers have their own views, express them, and expect to be given equal weight? Our fix has been to pretend like diversity is a good thing and that we’re all better off for it, which is not typically true in most fields or positions.
As with all things liberal, he who gets to control the meaning of the words, gets to determine the outcome of the debate. In this case, what exactly is “diversity”?
Since in too many cases, when a liberal uses the word “diversity”, they are using race as proxy for ideology, then it is presumed that people who are red (as in socialist) are preferable in every case to people who are white (conservative). It has also been my experience that executives send signals into the organization as to what ideology is to be hired and what is to be rooted out.
What kind of person seeks to work for such people?
“diversity” means conservative whitey male takes it in the shorts
It wouldn’t surprise me if lots of white males who own stock in Sam’s Club decide that they can find a more profitable company in which to invest their hard-earned dollars, and I would encourage them to do so.
Stupidity, particularly leftist stupidity, should be painful.
Up until my own layoff a year ago, I worked for a company that partnered with the major cell phone carriers. One carrier in particular had gone through a series of layoffs over the years I was partnered with them, but after their last round of layoffs I noticed that it seemed as if the majority of people who had been let go from their corporate sales teams and management were middle aged white males. This was particularly true in their California offices.
Yes, there must be a price for the attitudes of those running a corporation. Sam’s has been sliding downhill, and now we know why.
Black female CEO = irrelevent
SJW bonehead CEO = relevent
Having been in the corporate workforce for 42 years, I can say that all my favorite bosses over the years, except one, have been men; black, white or Indian (I DO work in IT, after all), and the exception was a white lesbian woman. Anytime I get a new boss, and she’s a woman, I start looking around for a transfer or a new job. Woman bosses are not worth the trouble they inevitably cause me, statistically speaking. They turn everything into a discussion. Just tell me what you freaking want, so I can do it and go home. That’s my position.
Not all women are like that, dude. I’m not. And I’m not, because I recognize two simple facts about corporate work:
1. Nobody gives you power. You just take it.
2. If you want to be successful, you’ve got to step up, take charge, have a plan and give orders that accomplish the plan.
Men like working for me because I give orders. A lot of women don’t like working for me, because I give orders. I don’t discuss sh1t and get a consensus; I’m the boss, I don’t need a freakin’ consensus.
This is diversity done right. No government in the loop. Isn’t what she is doing basically what Jews did when they came to this country – networked and kept it in the family so to speak? Isn’t that what libertarians have been telling black businesses to do? If her “diversity” efforts don’t work – she’s the one who will suffer from it.
There’s a subtle but important difference between encouraging those in your group and denigrating those not in your group. If she had stuck to the former and not ventured into the latter it wouldn’t have caused the firestorm that it has.
Just so everyone understands, I didn’t put a pistol to his head. :^)
So what was it, a hatchet?
Ah, so you admit that you’re “bossy?”
When Walmart leadership decided to attack the Arkansas Religious Freedom Restoration Act and to use their political pull to muscle Gov. Hutchinson into blocking it, I decided to stop shopping at Walmart and Sam’s Club.
Women don’t work in the rain, either. If it requires safety gear, heavy boots and a reflective vest… If it holds the danger that a 10-ton something-or-other will crush you… If there’s rain and bone-chilling cold… women will have nothing to do with it.
They want carpet and climate control for their workplace.
Sure: NAWALT — but most are.
And, at least when they’re younger, how they want that climate control set is to sweltering, and it the men are close to passing out, so what!, so that they can wear skimpy clothing … and then throw a hissy fit if the wrong men happen to notice how they are dressed.
I thought Sam’s Club was a division of Wal-Mart.
[…] previous post about Sam’s Club CEO Rosalind Brewer’s comments on corporate “diversity” was 900 words, which is but the tip of a vast iceberg of what I could say on this subject. […]
When I’m the boss, yeah, I sure am. I don’t micromanage, and I’m not one of those…whattya call ’em…five letter word starting with “c” and rhyming with “runts”…but I give an order and have every expectation it’s going to be followed.
Men prefer this. They are used to having somebody be the captain, or the coach, or the sargeant, whatever. It’s women that have a problem with it. Usually. Not always, but usually. They want a consensus, and don’t seem to get that “boss” thing. Asian and Indian women don’t mind so much in my experience, but American women…it’s no wonder marriages break up, LOL.
I can agree with that. I had 4 brothers, no sisters, growing up, we lived on a farm, my dad was former Navy. Lots of orders happening in my family, for sure, and argumentation was not an option. I guess that’s why I’m a freak. :D. But I’m a happy freak.
I just get really cold. And then hot. And then cold. It’s not my fault that you don’t like the a/c high…then low…then high…
Taking responsibility for decisions is good. Where you get problems is when information is not flowing upward because
1. People get penalized for offering viewpoints or factual bits inconvenient to the boss; or
2. The boss processes what is said to her to fit into her preconceived notions or plans of action, whether it fits or not or goes off on unpredictable tangents with new information.
You do not need to discuss decisions, but you do need someone who’s listening as well as talking.
Women don’t understand how men bleed, suffer, get injured and even die getting your stuff into a supermarket. And that’s not even a dangerous job. No one bleeds or lose fingers or get their heads crushed by a forklift in an office and that office is what feminists target. They want the gravy. How close to 100% are workplace deaths male?
I was talking about what lies behind human rights, nationhood and law, and it is naked violence. Female military deaths in our nation’s history are statistical zero. Even the 2.3% in Iraq and Afghanistan are within structures and with weapons women can’t and don’t create themselves. I am tired of being singled out as a demographic for only the bad stuff just to boost some moron’s collective ego. Guess what? On a civilizational level, I do all the good stuff too. But if I mention that I’m a Men’s Rights Activist. This con game is set up so men lose coming and going and I am sick of hearing the shrill keening. Left to my own devices I don’t think of such division, but these days, I am not being left to my own devices, am I? I am kicked out of colleges for regret rape, I am booted from awards because of lies about 20th century literature, etc.
And she suffers the consequences of it. When she doesn’t select the best supplier based on racial preferences, her product suffers. If she wanted to get suppliers who wore clown outfits during meetings – that’s up to her as well. Sticks and stones may break bones but “denigrating” does buttkiss. This reminds me of leftist manufactured “outrage” over nothing. Time to move on.
Other than Chik fil A and Hobby Lobby, I don’t know where to buy stuff anymore.
It’s nothing at all like what the Jews did. The Jews got ahead by working hard. The “diversity” mongers get ahead by whining hard.
In perfect market, these things would sort themselves out. We don’t have a perfect market. The market is embedded in a diseased culture of pervasive reverse racism and retributive bigotry.
It is, and the parent company has been sliding leftward ever since old Sam Walton died and left it to his shiftless spawn.
That’s a whole ‘nother story, right there.
American women *want* to be the boss … without *being* the boss. Now, of course, that’s self-contradictory, and thus absurd, but that’s my point.
How this works out in marriages, especially, is that is that they want what they want, when they want it, and they want *him* to take the responsibility for any adverse effects of getting what they want.
Well, that’s not me. When I’m the boss, the buck stops here. I was taught that by my Dad, a white, male heterosexual Christian.
What a coincidence. I’m a Men’s Rights Activist myself. : )
Your comment points out WHY I’m an MRA, which is, I WANT men to have lots of rights, because with rights comes great responsibility, and I don’t really want all that responsibility. If men want it, let ’em be the boss and have it, I say, and God bless ’em. Feminists need to learn that there’s no such thing as a free ride. Not that liberals would allow them to learn that lesson though, you understand.
Why would you think that I don’t listen? I listen to you, don’t I? My decision-making is simply not up for a vote. Those who report to me could easily go over my head and/or transfer out, and in 30 years as a manager, no one ever has. For that matter, I regularly give my peeps a big boost career-wise, and many of them still keep in touch all these years later.
Responsibility and good decision-making don’t go hand-in-hand with assholeishness. For that matter, lots of times my superiors allow me to make decisions for them, because I’m actually willing to make one and take responsibility for it.
I used to work at the local Walmart a couple of years ago. When I sat through their mandatory employee training and saw the infiltration of “microaggression” as a concept, I knew they’d been turned.
Sam Walton’s kids are a disgrace, and will drive that company into the ground.
I believe last year’s numbers on fatality were:
92% male, 8% female.
Another problem with diversity is the notion that all ideas are equally valid: they aren’t.
If 9 of the president’s economic advisers are free market capitalists, I promise you that extra value will not be added by making the 10th adviser a communist.
Some ideas are just wrong.
BTW, I’m not sure the comparison between Trump and Sam’s Club boycotters is true. The right was willing to leave everyone alone; it is the left who won’t agree to that.
Sam’s Club deserves to be boycotted because their CEO is a fascist.
That explains it. My Sam’s Club in a large midwestern city has hired a large number of functioning imbeciles. What they lack in competence they more than make up for in stupidity.