DEI pushback to Jack Daniel's and others is not about merit but about fear of competition
Every day, the list gets longer. Companies that had fully committed to improving diversity among staff and vendors have abandoned ship, unwilling to anger vocal members of their customer base who oppose such measures.
Recently, Jack Daniel, the Lynchburg, Tennessee-based company whose Black Label Tennessee Whiskey is the best-selling whiskey in the world, announced that it would be forgoing all DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) goals. Robby Starbuck, a Franklin, Tennessee-based conservative activist who’s been campaigning against “wokeness in corporate America” took credit for the reversal, posting the email from the company’s executive leadership team on X (formerly Twitter).
“We’re now forcing multi-billion-dollar organizations to change their policies without even posting just from fear they have of being the next company that we expose,” Starbuck wrote. “We are winning and one by one we will bring sanity back to corporate America.”
I’ve gotten lots of messages from folks like Starbuck, people who believe diversity efforts are detrimental to business and our country on the whole. They believe DEI has stoked division among us, and that eschewing diversity initiatives will somehow reunite us.
They want to build a better country, and they think the means to that end involves the continued marginalization of large segments of the population.
Black men have been historically passed over jobs they would qualify for
As I recently stated, while discussing the real meaning and impact of “Black jobs,” Black Americans ? Black men, in particular ? are disproportionately affected by unemployment rates and, when they are employed, are more likely to hold low-wage jobs.
Addressing these inequities was the original intent of Affirmative Action programs that later swelled into the DEI initiatives that are currently under attack. And while I can concede that their application has been far from flawless, I believe the good far outweighs the bad.
Humans are creatures of habit. We do what makes us comfortable, which is, in many cases, what we’ve done in the past. We avoid the new and uncertain, even when we’re told the novel could be beneficial. We are inherently risk averse, and we hold on to fallacies and illogic to justify our aversion.
It’s why, in 1987, some 40 years after Jackie Robinson broke Major League Baseball’s modern color barrier by joining the Brooklyn Dodgers, Dodgers manager Al Campanis appeared on an episode of ABC’s “Nightline” and explained that it was perfectly normal to have zero Black managers and general managers in the league.
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“I truly believe that they may not have some of the necessities to be, let’s say, a field manager, or perhaps a general manager,” Campanis said. “I don’t say all of them, but they certainly are short. How many quarterbacks do you have? How many pitchers do you have that are Black? The same thing applies.”
His perspective was clear: While Black men possessed the athleticism to become successful, and respected, baseball players, they lacked the internal goods to ascend to the sport's leadership positions.
When given an opportunity to clarify or retract his statements, Campanis doubled down: “Why are Black men or Black people not good swimmers? Because they don’t have the buoyancy.”
The reaction to DEI is based upon fear and inadequacy
Less than a year later, Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder, a sports commentator and Las Vegas bookmaker, made equally disturbing remarks about Black employment options in the NFL.
When asked about Black progress ahead of Martin Luther King’s birthday, particularly in pro sports, Snyder responded, “If [Black people] take over coaching like everybody wants them to, there’s not gonna be anything left for the white people. I mean, all the players are Black. The only thing that the whites control is the coaching jobs.”
Folks in the anti-DEI crowd argue that everything should be based on merit, that it’s not fair to seek to intentionally hire from certain groups based solely on their identity. But Campanis and Snyder’s remarks don’t speak to merit or competition. They reveal a deep sense of fear and inadequacy, and, as Snyder explicitly stated, a need to maintain control.
Those anti-DEI types? They’d also probably argue that a lot has changed since the late 1980s, that the unabashed ignorance of Campanis and Snyder is no longer present in the modern workforce. They’d say that any disparities in employment, promotion, or pay can be attributed to individual factors, that if Black candidates were more educated, or better qualified, they’d be hired, promoted, and paid at the same rate as their white counterparts.
Yet the data disputes this, too. Multiple reports have shown that white workers consistently have better employment prospects than Black and Latino workers, even when education and skill level are equal.
Jack Daniel's mentor was Black and so were many in his workforce
In an essay for Time.com, Fawn Weaver, founder and CEO of the premium whiskey brand Uncle Nearest, implored those who oppose DEI’s modern iterations ? and who, presumably, applaud their recent rollbacks ? to present a viable, alternative path toward an equitable workforce. “Maybe some current programs aren’t the answer, but what is?” she wrote. “If we can’t answer that, dismantling what we have only takes us back to a time when inequality was the rule of the land.”
Weaver was right to pose this question. Her company is named after Nearest Green, the Black man who taught Jack Daniel everything he knew and became the first master distiller of Jack Daniel, helping to launch the iconic brand. According to Weaver, Green was one of many of Black employees at Jack Daniel, as Daniel “hired based on merit, not race, drawing African Americans from surrounding towns.”
While Weaver failed to mention whether Daniel’s employees were paid equitably, the result of Daniel’s progressive hiring practices was a team that was half-Black, despite the racial politics of the 19th-century Jim Crow South and Lynchburg’s 20% Black population.
But the Jack Daniel staff was, and is, an anomaly. And while critics argue that Affirmative Action and DEI initiatives give unfair opportunity to unqualified candidates, it’s rare for a company or industry to embody the diversity of Jack Daniel’s early operation without having some outside incentive to do so.
Put differently: The “anti-woke” conservatives working to dismantle diversity efforts across industry and society argue that hiring decisions should be based on merit. Yet when merit is presumed to be the only qualifying factor, workforces tend to become overwhelmingly white.
It's hypocritical to cry foul then seek to impose your will on others
With the presidential election less than two months away, Americans on both sides of the political aisle acknowledge that our country is barreling toward a critical crossroads.
There is considerable divergence on how to navigate that crossroads, or how we arrived at this juncture in the first place. But one thing is certain: A refusal to acknowledge and address the needs of everyone in society ? even those with differing views ? won’t make things better. It will make them worse.
Starbuck didn’t always live just south of Nashville. Before moving to Tennessee in 2019, he was in Hollywood, directing movie videos. According to his own accounts, he was blackballed for his conservative views and forced into a career pivot. The long-term result is a man who prides himself on destroying well-intentioned attempts to support the careers of others.
Seems a bit hypocritical to me.
Andrea Williams is an opinion columnist for The Tennessean and curator of the Black Tennessee Voices initiative. She has an extensive background covering country music, sports, race and society. Email her at [email protected] or follow her on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @AndreaWillWrite.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Jack Daniel's dropped DEI programs and gave into fear and hypocrisy
