Monday's Opening Thought: May 30, 2022

This week’s opening thought: Wells Fargo was recently outed by current and former employees for conducting fake job interviews with candidates of color and female and femme-identifying candidates to make their diversity hiring numbers look good on paper.

Guess who has had this done to them by Wells Fargo the most.

If you guessed Black women and female/femme-identifying candidates, please feel free to fill in that space on your Corporate White Supremacy bingo card!

If you’re a white person or non-Black person of color reading this, and you’re shocked that a large national banking corporation would approach recruiting in this manner, I’m going to need you to sit down for a spell and assess where your shock is coming from. And I’m going to need you to do that on your own, away from Black folx and far away from any Black women you know. You have a great deal of white supremacist ideology unpacking you need to do, and Black people, Black women, do not need to be around you while you do the work.

The truth is, Wells Fargo isn’t the only company with hiring practices that are this harmful and exclusionary to Black women. Companies across the United States have approached sourcing and recruiting candidates of color, Black women, with these kinds of tactics for decades. Wells Fargo isn’t alone in stringing candidates of color along throughout the recruiting process for the sake of optics.

This is why diversity hiring initiatives stink.

“Diversity” only matters to most companies when it comes to how the annual hiring numbers look on paper for people of color, Black folx, and Black women hired in the last fiscal year. Companies want the optical illusion of having a diverse workforce without doing the hard work of evolving their workplace culture and maintaining spaces for people of color, Black people, and Black women to grow and thrive. Most companies don’t care if the patriarchal, oppressive, white supremacist workplace culture they’re so reluctant to address runs people of color away and harms Black folx and Black women. And when Black people leave? They blame it on “culture fit” and not being able to find enough “qualified Black candidates.”

Black people have been telling y’all about these issues for years. Black folx, Black women, have known this is part of companies keeping up appearances for decades and have told y’all this repeatedly. It’s easier for y’all to believe an implausible narrative that somehow all Black people you hire are “the problem” than to examine that your company is racist, sexist, and toxic for non-white people. It’s easier for whiteness to blame the oppressed than the oppressor.

If Wells Fargo is doing this to Black women, what makes you think your company isn’t doing this too? Like right now? And what makes you think they’ll change if you don’t speak up and call out these actions and push for change and accountability, white “allies?”

I guess you’d rather believe in the implausible.