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1. RACIAL DISCRIMINATION

L E A R N I N G O B J E C T I V E S

1. Define racial discrimination. 2. Distinguish different ways that racial discrimination occurs in the workplace. 3. Consider legal aspects of racial discrimination in a business environment. 4. Discuss ethical aspects of racial discrimination in a business environment.

1.1 The White Running Back Toby Gerhart is a bruising running back. Coming out of college at six feet and 225 pounds, he was drafted by the Minnesota Vikings football team with their first-round pick in 2010. It was a controver- sial choice. His playing style is unorthodox: he runs standing almost straight up and doesn’t do much faking and cutting. Most NFL runners get low and slip away from tacklers. Gerhart chugs and blows through things.

That’s not Gerhart’s only distinction. In a league where running backs—almost all of them—are black, he’s white. On the days leading to the draft, Gerhart feared his skin color might be expensive. An anonymous quote had been circulating, suggesting that his position in the draft order could fall, bring- ing his paycheck down along with it: “One longtime NFL scout insisted that Gerhart’s skin color will likely prevent him from being drafted in Thursday’s first round. ‘He’ll be a great second-round pickup for somebody, but I guarantee you if he was the exact same guy—but he was black—he’d go in the first round for sure,’ the scout said.”[1]

As it turned out, the scout was wrong. But the question of race in sports had flared, and the media came to it. One story appeared on an MSNBC-affiliated website called theGrio.com. Writer John Mitchell pointed out that twenty-seven of the NFL’s thirty-two general managers (those ultimately re- sponsible for draft-day selections) were white, and so, he asserted, it was “virtually impossible” that ra- cism could work against Gerhart.[2]

John Mitchell is black. In fact, if you go to theGrio.com’s contributor page, you’ll find that, as a rough estimate, 90 percent of the website’s writers are black, a number that’s far, far out of proportion with the global percentage of black writers out there. The disproportion, however, would be less sur- prising for anyone who’d read the description the site presents of itself: “TheGrio.com is devoted to providing African Americans with stories and perspectives that appeal to them but are underrepresen- ted in existing national news outlets. TheGrio features aggregated and original video packages, news

racial discrimination

In a business environment, treating individuals differently from others for reasons of race and at the expense of professional merit.

articles, and blogs on topics from breaking news, politics, health, business, and entertainment, which concern its niche audience.”[3]

On that same page, surfers are directed to a video story about theGrio.com produced by NBC New York, which is a station aimed at the general market, not theGrio.com’s niche audience. The story tells of theGrio.com’s origin, and in an interview with the website’s founder, he remarks that his contribut- ors are very diverse: “We have conservatives, liberals, old folks, young folks, rich folks, poor folks, politicians and plain folks.”[4]

The NBC story also informs us that the idea for creating a site that aggregated news stories in- volving the black community was taken to NBC executives who agreed to sponsor the website. We don’t learn which specific NBC execs received the proposal, but a quick check of the network’s direct- ors and programming directors and so on leads to the strong suspicion that most were white.