The Making of A Great America Uprooting the Spirit of Racism

Racism is a Spirit That Won't Just Go Away

In 2003 I met with McDonalds’ Vice President of Global Logistics at its Chicago headquarters. I was studying their diversity best practices as Deputy Director of the Secretary of Defense’s Business Board. Today, we’d call it DEI. McDonalds had higher-level leaders who were assigned to look after promising up-and-coming minority talent and affinity groups to help minority talent assimilate into McDonalds’ culture. They started these initiatives because they discovered that their minority employees needed something different to thrive in McDonalds’ culture. “Different” was a recognition that everybody doesn’t come from the same culture and needs different things to be successful. It did not mean minorities were less talented/qualified. McDonald’s did these things not to create targets/quotas but for profit. McDonalds forecasted that the America of 2020 would be more black and brown, and in order to be profitable in 2020 and beyond, it needed leaders who understood its future customer base. I was saddened to see that “McDonald's will no longer set ‘aspirational representation goals’ and will retire its pledge to diversify suppliers. (The company notes that it has made inclusion strides in recent years, drawing ‘30% of our U.S. leaders from underrepresented groups.’)” Have McDonalds’ profit goals changed? Racism is a spirit that will never go away, just like greed. What if we said greed and theft had been eliminated, and we don’t need the Securities and Exchange Commission anymore? DEI is a safeguard against the natural tendency for the majority to pick people who look like themselves.