Pete Buttigieg, Head Of HR
When Mitt Romney ran for president, there was a joke going around that you shouldn’t vote for him, because he reminds you of your boss. Well, if Pete Buttigieg (D-McKinsey) doesn’t remind you of your firm’s head of HR, you might not work for a Woke Capitalist, lucky guy. From the NYT:
In early December, more than 100 members of Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign staff gathered at the South Bend City Church a mile from headquarters for a mandatory half-day retreat about diversity and inclusion. Less than two months remained before the start of voting, a time when most campaigns are focused full-time on politics.
Buttigieg advisers say the retreat was part of an ongoing effort to foster a progressive culture that empowered employees of color. For some of these staff members, however, the workplace itself was a problem, and working for a candidate with so little support from black and Hispanic voters had become demoralizing.
In interviews, current and former staff members of color said they believed that senior Buttigieg officials didn’t listen to their concerns and ideas about the campaign. One said there was a daily “emotional weight” on people of color who felt they were employed in order to help the campaign meet its ambitious diversity targets. Some Hispanic employees said managers asked them to translate text even if they didn’t speak Spanish, making them feel disrespected.
You are running a national presidential campaign in which you are an underdog. Voting is bearing down on you like a freight train. Naturally you want to stop to hold a diversity retreat because some folks on a high-stress presidential campaign assumed that workers with Spanish last names spoke Spanish.
More:
A follow-up meeting nearly two weeks after the retreat — organized by staff members and attended by about 70 people — became emotional, according to two people who were present. Some employees of color spoke about feeling disrespected by white colleagues. Others said they felt stressed from having to answer questions from friends and family members about working for a candidate struggling with minority voters, the two people said.
A second meeting, on Jan. 2, featured lengthy discussions of the importance of diversity in hiring and sometimes tearful descriptions of the difficulty of recruiting people of color to the staff, according to a recording of the session that was provided to The New York Times.
It’s a blizzard of snowflakery! You want to know what politically-motivated stress is? Explaining to your Reagan-loving, politically inflexible Southern dad that you were in charge of Louisiana School Students for Mondale. A couple of years later, coming home from LSU and telling the same man, “Daddy, I’m a socialist.”
I survived. What is it with these people? If you can’t handle it when your friends and family want to know why you favor a particular political candidate, maybe you’re too fragile to work on that candidate’s national political campaign. As to the “feeling disrespected by white colleagues,” I wouldn’t want to pre-judge whether they actually were disrespected — if so, then shame on the whites who did the disrespecting — but it seems to me that a political campaign behind a bourgeois gay liberal Democrat is rather unlikely to draw anti-black bigots. It’s almost like the woke atmosphere within the campaign encourages fragility.
The campaign was rocked by this hysterical, slanderous essay in The Root, a black online publication, calling Buttigieg guilty of “negligent homicide” for having incorrect attitudes towards black poverty. The author bills himself as a “world-renowned wypipologist” (white-people-ologist). Now, when a world-renowned wypipologist puts you in his sights, you must take defensive action straightaway. The Buttigieg campaign did the McKinsey-est thing ever: distributed a questionnaire exclusively to people of color, asking them to list the microagressions they’ve experienced on the campaign:
Hands up for how many people — of any race whatsoever — could tick off most of the boxes on the left? It’s called being a human being in a workplace. On the right-hand column, well, that’s simply an invitation to fragility, and a guarantee that the workspace is going to turn a completely neurotic eggshell factory.
One more thing. The campaign, being properly woke, set diversity hiring goals. But they’re hard to meet because for whatever reasons, people of color aren’t drawn to Team Pete. Rather than accepting that and moving on, they freak out over the inegalitarianism of it all:
Alexis Gonzaludo, a member of the fund-raising department, told colleagues that “my stomach is in knots” as she talked about the difficulty of attracting diverse candidates. She said she had become dismayed when she looked in the campaign’s hiring database and “it’s just like, a bunch of white dudes.”
“It’s been a shock, but not a surprise — really hard to find diverse candidates,” Ms. Gonzaludo said. “I feel a lot of pressure to, like, just hire someone.”
Again, I remind you: Buttigieg is a relative long shot to win the Democratic nomination. The Democratic caucuses and primaries are about to start. The campaign needs to field as many dedicated workers as possible, immediately. But because of the standards of middle-class wokeness, they’re somewhat paralyzed internally. The “white dudes” who believe in Buttigieg and want to work for him are just too wypipo, and it’s giving a diversity-hirer fits.
Read the whole story. Buttigieg represents everything you hate about what consultants like McKinsey have done to the workplace. I have worked for employers who listened to McKinsey, where Buttigieg worked. Believe me, seeing McKinsey people in the building made people know two things: our company was spending big money that could be going to employee raises on advice from these suits, and that that expensive advice was going to make our workplace more bureaucratic and worse.
UPDATE: Reader Mr_Squires:
I wrote a few pieces for The Root before they took a hard turn to the left. They claim to be a publication targeted to black people but they spend an inordinate amount of time and energy talking about white people. In fact, they have an entire series of articles (over 200 at my last count) with the tag “White People”, including a classic from the writer you referenced entitled “The 5 Types of Becky”. It’s predictable, boring, and useless writing but it seems to have a wide audience, which saddens me. The woke talk a good game but there is no one in the political sphere that believes in the superiority of white words, beliefs, and behaviors–and, conversely, the inadequacy of black agency–than hard Left progressives. These are the people that will list every disparity between black and white (e.g., employment, education, health) as reasons why we can’t progress but won’t say a single word about the state of marriage and family in the black community. They simultaneously believe that whites are oppressors and the source of all black problems yet look to whites to create new systems and institutions to solve these problems because black people have no power. It’s a self-defeating ideology that breeds paternalism and condescension from woke whites, not true equality for blacks.
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