What are we saying?

By Jim Thompson
HCP columnist
In the early 1970s, I worked for a little old soap company in Cincinnati, Ohio (one that happens to make diapers, tissue and a zillion other products).
Their workforce had been predominately white and male. However, always sensitive to cultural changes, for they were (and probably still are) deathly afraid of getting out of line with mainstream thinking, they had determined to change their ways.
Even then, they were afraid of boycotts if they missed society's trends.
And as they did (and do) all things, they jumped in with both feet. Senior management determined that we not only had to change our hiring practices, but that this couldn't be just tokenism, that it was just as racist to hire someone for their skin color or gender and not hold them accountable for producing the same level of work as current employees as it was to not hire them at all.
In our department, two industrial psychologists were hired to adjust our thinking. I am grateful I had the experience and had it so early in my career. It has affected me in a positive way ever since.
These two gentlemen, the psychologists, had many tools and insights to help us understand our own feelings and assess the true nature of any given situation.
Let's say you had a situation involving a white and an African-American. The way you tested that situation was to turn it around – if it played the same way when you reversed the roles of the participants, you were assessing it properly.
If it played out in some different way, your thoughts were probably wrong or at least misguided.
Recent surveys show that 68 percent of Americans believe President George Bush is still responsible for the economic conditions we find in the United States today.
In other words, the current occupant of the White House is given a pass. I probably don't have to tell you that George Bush is generally considered to be a white person and Barack Obama is generally considered to be an African-American person, in fact, our first African-American president.
I got to thinking about this using the principles I was taught so many decades ago by those two African-American psychologists.
First, there is the issue of holding people accountable for their actions. For as one pundit on the Sunday news programs put it recently, a football coach would not be given the pass on performance that President Obama is being given.
Then, I took it a step further, again, using my training. What if George Bush had been our first African-American president and Barack Obama was yet another white president?
Who would be yelling if the current occupant of the White House was white and was still, four years later, blaming the first African-American president for the economic conditions in which we find ourselves? How would that be playing out?
In football, in business, in many other endeavors, the leader, the coach, the president would not be allowed four years to fix the problems.
I can tell you in business, the rule is simple: You have one year. A charismatic football coach may be given two years.
President Obama came to office with a clear promise: He was going to fix things.
Further, he said if he did not fix things by the end of his first term, he would probably be a one-term president.
The honorable thing for him to do, since he has failed to keep his promises, is to do what Lyndon Johnson did in 1968 – tell us he is not going to run again.
President Obama has not lived up to even his own standards. Criticizing him has been labeled as being racist by his apologists. Really?
That is backward from everything I was taught by whom, I am sure, were top psychologists in the field. (For that little old soap company never does anything by halves.)
Jim Thompson, formerly of Marshall, is a graduate of Hillsboro High School and the University of Cincinnati. He resides in Duluth, Ga., following decades of wandering the world, and is a columnist for The Highland County Press.
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