The Washington Post chose a new executive editor on Tuesday, giving Philip Bennett, chief of the foreign news desk, the number two spot at the paper. However, what has caused a major ruckus at the Post is the fact that Bennett bested Eugene Robinson, the black editor in charge of the Post’s Style section, for the job.
There is no evidence that Bennett isn’t extremely well-qualified for the position. For the last five years, he has run the foreign news desk, a position of prominence, especially in recent years. What seems to have the staff at the Post worked up is simply the fact that a qualified white man was chosen over a qualified black man.
The promotion has increased racial tensions at the paper, where black staffers banded together to press the issue of race:
“We’re crushed,” said national reporter Darryl Fears at the meeting. Fears, who is black, organized two meetings of African American staffers in recent days in response to Bennett’s promotion. “A lot of our worst suspicions were confirmed about the ability of African Americans and other minorities to rise to the highest level of the best papers in the world,” he said.
Exactly what “worst suspicions” were confirmed here? That the Post is racist in its promotion policies? That would be easily refuted by noting that the majority of the Post’s top editors are not white males. No, the travesty here is that race wasn’t taken into account in the hiring decision. In the words of Bennett:
“I felt several people made clear that there wasn’t hostility toward me as much as a very legitimate series of questions and concerns about the newsroom’s commitment to diversity.”
Nobody is mad at Bennett, on a completely race-neutral level he was a logical choice for the job. What people are mad about is that the Post is not sufficiently committed to the new religion of Diversity: it evaluates people too much on merit and too little on the color of their skin.
This is the ugly side of Diversity, a concept that is far out of step with the original goals of the civil rights movement. Instead of fostering an environment where everybody can work together and people are judged by their accomplishments, Diversity has fractured organizations into racial groups that look at the world in terms of numbers of white and black faces and see those of different races as the enemy.
What Diversity advocates don’t understand is that America is already diverse, and as time goes on we are only getting more so. For the last 60 years, incredible progress has been made towards giving everybody in America the opportunity to do whatever their talents will allow. Diversity doesn’t further this cause, it endangers it. When we judge people by race, for any reason, we only succeed at creating division and animosity.
More:
Outside The Beltway: “Washington Post Dumbing Down”
Note: We have submitted this story to the Outside the Beltway “Beltway Traffic Jam.”
Sean Christofferson at 11:15 am
