But frankly, in a perverse way, many of these companies deserve their fate. Once they started down the road of paying for lawsuit protection in the form of diversity training, affirmative action hiring and promotion, and cultural awareness, they were doomed. Every Mafiosi knows that once a business starts paying him for protection, the premiums grow larger and larger until he gets it all.
MetLife should have gone to court and fought. Other American companies, however, should learn an important lesson from this: elevating an individual's race as an element in contracting, hiring and promoting won't indemnify your company from a racial-bias litigation. In the end, every American pays for this capitulation since companies inevitably pass on their expenses to consumers.
But most tragically of all is the cost borne by black Americans, who ultimately pay the steepest price for this corporate surrender. As author Shelby Steele has noted, too many blacks suffer "from bad ideas, from ignorance, fear, a poor assessment of reality and from a politics that commits them to the idea of themselves as victims." His voice is complemented by National Public Radio's Juan Williams who has stated that slavery reparations "would tell Americans . . . that blacks, especially poor blacks, are a broken people who must be treated as wards of the state. Black people would be more highly stigmatized and negatively stereotyped than ever before."
Our society struggles to overcome the myth that many blacks are simply unable to make it in America. Slavery reparations are tailor-made not only to foster a sense of black victimhood, but further reinforce the stigma of black inferiority.
If corporate America takes the easy way out and abandons principle, it won't be a surprise--only a shame.
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