Race quotas are racist

Dear Mr. CEO of a big corporation,

I am writing in regards to your recent note to all employees entitled “Our company taking action to address racism and inequality”. On one side I would like to share my point of view on the subject and on the other, I would like to help clarify certain points and bring some ideas to the table.

First, let’s address our company’s aim for BIPOC candidates to make up at least 40 % of new interns and student hires. If we acknowledge that skin colour has no effect on candidates’ skill sets and imagine that we were able to conduct the interview process blindly, then we would expect the percentage of new employees of colour to be roughly the same as the percentage of people of colour graduating. However, visible minorities represent 22 % of the total Canadian population and 31 % of university graduates, not 40 % (Statistics Canada).

Let’s take a quick look at how selecting candidates by the colour of their skin will increase racism in the company. Let’s say we were hiring 10 new employees, we would statistically expect around 3 people of colour and 7 whites to be selected if we were to conduct the interviews blindly. Following the guidelines you have proposed, we would hire 1 more person of colour that scored less in the interview and reject 1 of the whites that scored more. This means that the last person of colour to have been selected would lower the average interview scoring of people of colour versus whites. It is easy to see how this situation will not only lower the enterprise performance but also generate racism as the selected non-whites will be less good than whites. I believe it goes without saying that we don’t want to build a company where whites are better than blacks.

I understand that what we are doing is on trend with what the industry is doing and addresses a PR challenge. However, it seems to me like we are confused as to what will bring actual change in our company and in our society. It is obvious that there is a real problem with the general life experience of black people in Canada as they are statistically poorer, more likely to go to prison, to commit crimes and not go to university than whites. I believe that this is an extremely important problem that we need to address together as a society. What can our company do to help? A lot actually. I fully agree that we need to improve our interview process and make it blind to the colour of candidates’ skins, just like artists interviewing for an orchestra will play behind a curtain. This can be achieved quite simply by different methods such as leveraging online tests and blurring the candidate name and nationality on their resume.

Besides, people of colour that go to university will generally have access to jobs, especially in engineering and other technical fields where placement rates are close to 100 %. The biggest problem is that a large percentage of black people will simply not go to university at all. This means that trying to hire more people of colour when they get out of school is not tackling the real issue. Our goal should be to achieve equal opportunity with whites and non-whites having the same chance to attend and finish university. However, the problem of equal opportunity is far more complicated than simply “racism”, it is an economic, sociological and educational issue. Even though it cannot be tackled in the recruiting process, it does not mean that we cannot help on this front as well. One thing we can do is invest in poor district schools which contain an overwhelming percentage of people of colour. For example, we could sponsor software development courses in primary and secondary schools and freely distribute learning tools like Raspberry Pi which are affordable mini-computers. Software development and computer science skills are extremely in need in our business and elsewhere and it is very rarely taught at such an early age except in private (and overwhelmingly white) schools.

The question of racism, discrimination, and integration of people of colour is a complex issue that requires time and effort to solve. If we want to have a meaningful impact as a company, we need to go beyond the popular narrative and ask ourselves what will actually help. I strongly believe that our company can and should do a lot and that applying simple actions such as investing in poor neighborhoods and making our interview process blind will make a huge difference. I understand this direction is different from the one you proposed and I am very much interested in leading the proposed initiatives.

Thank you very much and I hope to hear back from you,

Guillaume