Workplace Political Discrimination is the Civil Rights Crisis of Our Time

By Daniel Greenfield March 27, 2023 @ Sultan Knish Blog 

Federal, state and municipal governments relentlessly pursue workplace discrimination, but none of them address the most pervasive form of workplace discrimination in America.

Political discrimination or viewpoint discrimination is everywhere.

And yet at a time when workplaces impose unconscious bias tests to target racial prejudice and other forms of discrimination, few corporations look for viewpoint discrimination. Some even mandate it in their HR procedures which systematically discriminate against conservatives.

Meanwhile the problem appears to have worsened over the last 4 years.

A 2019 survey by the Society for Human Resource Management found that a third of workers believe their employer is intolerant of differing political views. A Perceptyx survey in 2020 found that nearly half of employees expressed concern that they would be mistreated if they disagreed with their manager’s politics and 53% thought it would negatively impact their careers.

Even though numbers like these point to a much higher incidence of workplace discrimination than most of the identity politics metrics that government employment protection groups focus on, viewpoint discrimination is still not being addressed either by legislators or officials even though projecting some of these numbers would indicate that it affects tens of millions of people.

The cancel culture crisis that began on college campuses has spread into the workplace.

In our recent breakdown of the crisis at universities, the David Horowitz Freedom Center cited statistics showing the degree to which college students feel intimidated into keeping quiet.

At MIT, 68% of students were afraid to disagree with a professor about a controversial topic and 40% of faculty members were keeping quiet to avoid getting into trouble. A majority of students at the University of Wisconsin have stayed quiet in class and 37%, mostly conservative, felt pressured to agree with an instructor’s position. But, as we pointed out, the nation has become one giant college campus, and workplaces have become the next front in the woke culture wars.

This survey from the Alliance Defending Freedom drills down to show how the campus iron curtain has fallen on workplaces and gets hard numbers on who is being intimidated into keeping quiet about their political views. The survey shows that conservatives are being disproportionately impacted by workplace viewpoint discrimination which also implies that leftists are responsible for much of viewpoint discrimination in the workplace.

The numbers shown in the ADF survey are significantly higher in some regards than the 2019 and 2020 surveys, implying that workplace viewpoint discrimination is worsening every year.

The ADF survey notes that, “large majorities (60% and 64%) say that respectfully expressing religious or political viewpoints would likely or somewhat likely carry negative consequences on their employment.”

What’s really disturbing is that people are not just afraid to express their views at work, which are arguably not places for political or religious debates, but on their own time as “54% say they are concerned that sharing political content on their own social media accounts could result in negative consequences in the workplace.” That’s a majority of Americans who are self-censoring their own views full time because they exist in a social media panopticon.

Is all of this hypothetical? Are people making a big deal over perceptions and empty fears?

“1 in 4 say they know someone who has experienced negative consequences for respectfully expressing their political viewpoints (27%) or religious viewpoints (25%).” 44% of the workers who were worried about it were conservative, 26% moderate and only 28% liberal.

Of those who described negative consequences for expressing political views, 44% were conservative, another 28% were moderate and only 26% were liberal. That strongly suggests that workplace discrimination over political affiliation disproportionately affects non-leftists (72%). It also follows that for workplace viewpoint discrimination is mostly practiced by leftists against non-leftists. And indeed, virtually every high-profile case of someone being fired over their politics in the last 3 years involves Americans falling afoul of leftist companies.

The survey reports that 147 workers were fired for discussing their political views. Of those, 82 were conservative, 35 were moderate and only 31 were liberal. Another 163 were demoted, 181 were excluded from professional development, 274 faced hostile treatment at work, and another 81 suffered all of the above.

Considering that this was a survey of 3,000 workers, that is a sizable number.

25% or 753 workers said that they knew someone who had “experienced negative treatment or discrimination at work for respectfully communicating a religious viewpoint?” 332 of those fellow workers were conservative, 234 were moderate, 229 were liberal. 177 workers were fired, 181 were demoted, 226 were excluded from professional development and 322 faced hostile treatment.

This is a civil rights crisis of workplace discrimination that has been ignored for too long.

Biden’s EEOC claims the right to protect men who claim to be women (despite the lack of any law allowing it to do any such thing) along with every possible identity politics, but offers no protection for workers suffering from the pervasive crisis of viewpoint discrimination.

The failure of agencies, commissions and officials to protect workers discriminated against due to their viewpoints shows how outdated forms of civil rights legislation no longer address the forms of discrimination that workers face today. Federal and state administrations and legislatures need to step up and take action to fight this most pervasive form of discrimination.

That means ensuring that workplace rules on political discourse and identification should be even-handed and not discriminatory. That means workplaces cannot permit, let alone promote, Black Lives Matter, while barring viewpoints and perspectives that differ from the racist movement. Similarly employees should be able to promote all political candidates or none.

Finally workers should not fear that their private speech outside the workplace should impact their employment. In recent years workers who were targeted by woke cancel culture were fired even when the activities that some found offensive consisted of personal opinions expressed on their own time. Most jobs do not require ‘moral clauses’ and clear cases of viewpoint discrimination like these deserve civil rights protections.

The Constitution offers protection first and foremost to political viewpoints, not identities. America was founded on defending political dissent, rather than race, sexuality or any such thing. The failure to fight viewpoint discrimination betrays the founding legacy of America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.

A War on Excellence

Asra Q. Nomani Daniel Kennelly September 27, 2021 @ City Journal

A former Wall Street Journal correspondent, Asra Q. Nomani is an author, codirector of the Pearl Project, cofounder of the Muslim Reform Movement, and vice president of strategy and investigations at Parents Defending Education. She spoke with City Journal associate editor Daniel Kennelly.

Could you tell us about Thomas Jefferson High School, Fairfax County Public Schools’ changes to the admissions process, and what the Coalition for TJ is trying to accomplish?

The battle over admissions to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, ranked the number one school in the United States, is a battle for the American Dream. It’s a struggle to protect the ideas of merit, hard work, and educational excellence. A year ago, in summer 2020, a brave group of mostly immigrant parents, with names like Yuyan Zhou, Suparna Dutta, and Himanshu Verma, formed Coalition for TJ to defend not only our children’s school but also America against ideologues and activists intent on destroying the core of education and excellence in this nation.

Like the parents of many other students and alumni of TJ, I came to the United States as an immigrant. My family arrived from India in the 1960s, with dollars to our name. About seven of ten TJ students are of Asian descent, about two of ten are white, and about one of ten is black, Hispanic, or multiracial. We all agree that that last number is too low, but we disagree about how to increase it. At Coalition for TJ, we believe that the school system must address its decades of failure and fix the pipeline to TJ, one that our families also struggled to traverse.

Unfortunately, in the name of “social justice,” bureaucrats and activists decided, in December 2020, to replace TJ’s merit-based, race-blind admissions with a “holistic” process that is essentially a subjective popularity contest and a zip-code quota system.

What effect has the elimination of the merit-based admissions test had on the makeup of this year’s class? Who are its beneficiaries?

School district officials announced that, as a result of their new admissions system, they had slashed the percentage of Asian students admitted to TJ to 54 percent this year, from 73 percent last year. The percentage of blacks and Hispanics increased—as it also did for white students.

This is a purge against Asian-American students by Fairfax County Public Schools. The school district illegally made race a factor in the decisions.

This spring, the Pacific Legal Foundation filed a federal lawsuit against the Fairfax County School Board, arguing that the new admission standards violate our children’s constitutional right to equal protection. We go to court on Friday, September 17, for initial proceedings. This past May, U.S. District Judge Claude Hilton rejected the school district’s request to dismiss the case. “Everybody knows the policy is not race-neutral,” he declared, “and that it’s designed to affect the racial composition of the school.”

Our battle in northern Virginia is happening elsewhere, too—in San Francisco, New York City, and Boston. Under the cover of fighting against discrimination and injustice, activists are launching a new era of discrimination and injustice. It’s up to parents to stand up against this abuse of power.

You’re involved with another group, Parents Defending Education, aimed at combating political indoctrination in the classroom. Could you tell us about that work?

The fight at my son’s school made an accidental educational activist out of me. It connected me with amazing parents around the country. Earlier this year, I joined forces with Nicole Neilly, Erika Sanzi, Marissa Fallon, and other mothers and fathers to launch Parents Defending Education to help empower other parents, expose the indoctrination that is happening in schools, and engage with leaders to restore education. This puts us in the crosshairs of a well-funded, well-organized network of activists, ideologues, and academics who are hell-bent on “disrupting” education by infusing schools with their political and ideological agendas. These activists are pitting students against each other by dividing them into categories of “oppressed” and “oppressor,” separating students based on race, and creating a new hierarchy of human value that is bigoted, cruel, and racist.

What’s at stake in this battle?

We are in an existential struggle for the future of our country’s children—and the future of America. On the twentieth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, let me give you an example of how this threat plays out.

On August 27, the Virginia Department of Education posted a webinar on its official YouTube channel, in which a local educator, Amaarah DeCuir, a lecturer at American University, instructed teachers not to call the 9/11 hijackers “terrorists” but instead to call them “extremists,” without any discussion of Islamic extremism. She also advised them to avoid any discussion of “American exceptionalism,” instructing them instead to focus on “anti-Muslim racism.” As a Muslim reformer, I call this woke-washing.

She said, “We’re also not going to reproduce what’s understood as American exceptionalism—this understanding that America is a land at the top of a beautiful mountain and that all other countries, nations, and people are less than America.”

Parents in Virginia shared the video with us at Parents Defending Education, expressing deep concern about the historical revisionism in the lesson guidelines and the insensitivity of the speaker and the state agency to the history of the 9/11 attacks. After we pushed back, the Virginia Department of Education removed the webinar from its official YouTube channel. But the agency is still sharing DeCuir’s PowerPoint presentation as part of its “EdEquity VA” webinar series. And at a recent Fairfax County school board meeting, board member Abrar Omeish recommended that the school district’s chief diversity officer use DeCuir’s recommendations to guide lessons about 9/11. Omeish then voted against a resolution honoring the victims of 9/11. Her father is a leader at the local mosque, called the “9/11 mosque,” where the hijackers prayed. Parents, including me, watched these remarks, horrified.

In the hall, a mother stood up and yelled, away from the microphone, “It’s a sham!”

On this issue, too, we sounded the alarm, sharing the video of the board member’s disturbing arguments. And we shared the voice of the parent. We must give parents not just the microphone but a bullhorn. This is a fight for America itself. We all need to stand up and raise our voices.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). DONATE

 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin Calls Out Anti-Asian American Discrimination in U.S. During Trip to Singapore Defense Sec’y Austin Trashes Americans While in Singapore

Kristina Wong 28 Jul 2021

 

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin called out anti-Asian American discrimination in the United States during a trip to East Asia this week to reassure allies and partners.

“Our partnerships draw strength from our shared belief in greater openness, and our belief that people live best when they govern themselves. Now, our democratic values aren’t always easy to reach. And the United States doesn’t always get it right,”...... “We’ve seen some painful lapses, like the unacceptable and frankly un-American discrimination that some Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have endured in my country in recent months,”

The Biden administration has made diversity a key focus at the Pentagon. Austin is the first African American secretary defense, and the first defense secretary to hire a senior adviser on human capital and diversity, equity, and inclusion issues.........To Read More.... 

My Take - What we've really seen in recent months are losers like this guy spouting clabber that clearly violates their oath of office.  As for all these hate crimes against Asian Americans, who exactly are responsible? Is it white America? Is it Hispanic America?  Is it Asian on Asian Americans?  Or is it black America?  You can only take one guess!  

 This man is a disgrace, right along with Colin Powell who openly supported Joe Biden for President. 

Diversity—Unless You’re Asian

The Supreme Court will soon decide whether to hear a case concerning Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policy.

Kenny Xu June 3, 2021 @ City Journal

The Supreme Court will soon consider whether to take up the long-awaited Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard case, which pits Harvard’s race-conscious admissions process against a group of Asian-American applicants who don’t fit into Harvard’s idea of “favored minorities.” The central idea behind the case is whether Harvard’s use of race to create what it sees as a “diverse” class runs afoul of the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

If there is one area in which the American elite seems to be moving in lockstep, it is increasing racial diversity. Many Fortune 500 businesses now operate Diversity and Inclusion offices. Every selective college is quick to tout its “diverse student body.” These initiatives sound good in theory, but the movement for racial diversity too often comes at the expense of hiring or admitting the most qualified candidate. Increasingly, the qualified candidate who gets denied is Asian-American—member of a minority group still considered, for diversity purposes, not in need of rescuing.

The reason why Harvard admissions officers don’t consider Asian-Americans a “minority” for assistance purposes is because in their eyes, Asian-Americans are too successful to be helped. As a group, Asian-Americans are socioeconomically on par with whites; educationally, they outpace whites (though there is nationwide variation, just as there is among any racial group). 

Yet, Asian-Americans did not gain their status in this country because of inherited “privilege”—as many on the left allege whites have done—but through a relentless focus on academic preparation and self-sufficiency. 

As I write in my upcoming book An Inconvenient Minority, “Asian American students compete hard for their educational opportunities . . . Poor and rich Asians alike study an average of thirteen hours per week, more than twice as much as the typical non-Hispanic white student who studies a mere 5.5 hours per week at home.” Harvard prefers to ignore the reality of Asian-American students’ hard work and preparation—that is, their merit—and instead treat them in the admissions process as if they were a privileged group.

The consequence of considering Asian-Americans unfavored minorities is clear: less qualified individuals from other social groups get their shot before Asian-Americans with higher qualifications do. According to Students for Fair Admissions’ analysis, a black applicant to Harvard in the 40th academic percentile of all applicants has a higher chance of admission than an Asian-American in the 90th academic percentile. Asians in the 90th academic percentile are unfavored compared with Hispanics in the 60th percentile and whites in the 80th percentile as well.

This phenomenon extends to medical schools and other graduate schools. A 2017 American Enterprise Institute study revealed that a black American with a 3.2–3.39 GPA and a 24–26 MCAT (under an older MCAT scoring system, since replaced) had a ten times higher chance of admission than an Asian-American with the same scores, and a higher chance than even an Asian-American with a 3.6–3.79 GPA and a 30–32 MCAT.

College admissions data reveal that Asians have been kept between 15 percent and 20 percent of admissions to Harvard. The same data reveal similar effective quotas for other top colleges, including Yale, MIT, and Stanford. As more Asians enter universities and perform well, universities resort to increasingly harsh racial balancing procedures against them.

Racial discrimination should not be tolerated at any professional level. Yet a vast network of racial discrimination exists at the university level against Asian-American students simply because they don’t fit into a category of favored minority that other races and ethnicities enjoy. This is a form of racial engineering that excludes one minority in favor of another. It should end—and the Harvard case is an opportunity to end it.

Kenny Xu is a journalist working on the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard lawsuit and the author of the upcoming book An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy.

City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529). SUPPORT

 

Justice Served: Supreme Court Knocks Lib College Down A Peg

Magnus McCoy - March 9, 2021   

Liberals are making schools hostile environments for conservatives, which is sad because these are the institutions that are supposed to be teaching the youth of our nation. But instead of being places of learning, they have into Liberal indoctrinating centers. So of course a Christian student, Chike Uzuegbunam, found himself censored when he dared to spread the good word at Georgia Gwinnett College. Uzuegbunam however didn't take the attack on his free speech sitting down, and went after the college, suing them. And The Supreme Court backed him.

"Chike Uzuegbunam, a Christian student at Georgia Gwinnett College, had sued his school after the college prevented him from preaching the gospel and handing out religious tracts due to its excessive speech codes, which limited free speech to 0.0015 percent of campus. Uzuegbunam sued, demanding an injunction and nominal damages. At first, the school defended its policy and claimed that Uzuegbunam’s preaching “arguably rose to the level of ‘fighting words.'” Then the college reversed, dropping the challenged policies.

Both the district court and the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that since the college had dropped its restrictions, the case was moot. Yet Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas ruled that a demand for nominal damages can save a lawsuit from becoming moot............To Read More....

Biden Makes Plans To Discriminate Against Certain Americans

Written by Magnus McCoy - January 12, 2021

Despite the rollout of vaccines, we are still very much in the middle of a pandemic and because of it many Dem leaders are still going overboard with their restrictive lockdowns. These restrictions are causing many small businesses to suffer as they try to stay afloat while obeying these new ordinances. So many businesses need government aid in order to keep their doors open regardless of their race/gender/beliefs. But Biden, who was harping about unity, is planning to pass a relief bill that is full of discrimination against white people.

During a news conference in Delaware Biden explained his plan.

“Our focus will be on the small businesses on Main Street that aren’t wealthy and well-connected and that are facing real economic hardships through no fault of their own,”............To Read More....

•  White House Showcases List of Trump Presidency Accomplishments

Parents sue Montgomery County schools over race discrimination

September 5, 2020 by Paul Mirengoff in Discrimination, Racial Preferences

I’ve written before about how Montgomery County, Maryland, where I live, discriminates against Asian-Americans in education. The discrimination consists of limiting the number of Asian-Americans admitted to the County’s “magnet” programs for gifted students.

The County wants more Black and Latino students in these programs. To achieve this, it admits these students based on lower standards than are required for other applicants. The result is the exclusion of some Asian-Americans due to their race.

In response to this blatant discrimination, and having failed to persuade the powers that be to end it, a group of parents has filed a lawsuit against the County school system. The group, organized as the Association for Education Fairness, is asking a federal court in Maryland to find that changes to the admissions process that have limited the number of Asian-American students violate the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause.

The facts underlying the lawsuit are basically those I recounted here. This article in the Daily Signal also discusses them. The complaint is here..............To Read More....

My Take - What's fascinated me is how many Asian Americans are Democrats, or at least have been in the past.  Why?   I have no idea since everything they do and believe in is antithetical to the values of the Democrat party.  I may never know the answer to that.  But I think that's going to change, and the answer for that would be obvious to the most casual observer. 

One more thing.  Maybe they're not being supported by the Democrat party for a reason.

Maybe, just maybe, instead of working hard at getting a good education, getting married, working hard on a job and moving forward, contributing to society in a positive way and raising their children with those same values, they became violent and burned down their homes, businesses, killed a whole bunch of their fellow Asians and had a 70% illegitimacy rate they'd get preferential treatment from the Democrat party.  

See, they have a values issue with the Democrat party.  But who wants their support if that's what it takes!  Better just to make them obey the law!

Social engineering and liberals' warped sense of justice

March 12, 2019 By Majid Mohammadi

If somebody tells you that basketball in the U.S. is not diverse enough and discriminates against Asian- and European-descended people because most of the players are black, you and every basketball fan will laugh to death.

I have not seen any complaint about the high number of Indian-Americans in the hospitality sector or high number of Asian-Americans in nail salons. But when you are told that most of the mathematicians are male, someone may jump to the conclusion that something is wrong with our educational system.

Why is that?

Why does asking for more diversity (in numbers) seem ridiculous in one area and legitimate in another? Is there a legal impediment for women to choose math as their major and career? Is there a social taboo about this? Do people have a choice to do what they want to do with their lives?

This double standard goes back to the change of social values in the last couple of decades in some parts of the East and West Coasts of the U.S. American media and academia have been successful in indoctrinating four ideas in this period:........ Read more

California pols could target tax status of Boy Scouts, youth groups over ‘discrimination’

Posted on August 29, 2013 byCowboy Byte

California lawmakers are cruising toward a final vote on a bill that could threaten the tax-exempt status of American-as-apple-pie groups — ranging from the Boy Scouts to Little League — if their membership policies are found to be discriminatory.

If passed, the bill, SB 323, would remove an exemption from state taxes for any nonprofit youth group that discriminates on the basis of “gender identity, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, or religious affiliation.” Well-known organizations like Girl Scouts of the USA, Boy Scouts of America, and Little League International Baseball and Softball were cited in the bill, which was introduced in February by Democratic state Sen. Ricardo Lara. ………To ReadMore