“The color of money is green”
How a common dismissal of racism actually points to its persistence
A New York Times piece about racial bias at Amazon got me thinking about one of the most common misunderstandings that smart White people have about racism.
I’ll call it the “color of money is green” theory.
Here’s the theory, as it might be used to defend Amazon:
“Come on man, Bezos didn’t start the company to do racism, he’s trying to make money and innovate in a hurry. They need smart people constantly — why would they deny promotions to qualified Black and Latin people?”
Of course, this theory is partially right. There’s a lot that it correctly understands about the importance of competence in overriding racial prejudice. In the past few generations, plenty of racist White people who would have preferred a White doctor (or lawyer or teacher) ended up choosing a Black doctor (or lawyer or teacher) because they were simply too excellent at their profession to deny.
But the same argument can be flipped on its head. Amazon, and other companies in a hurry, often respond to the pressure they’re under by going with the flow wherever possible — which can mean accommodating racism and sexism.
Giving vital people whatever they want — including excluding people they aren’t interested in working with, even if this is done without a coherent plan — is one of the many practical compromises that organizations make. We’ve seen it with high-level executives at companies like Uber, whose long-known toxicity didn’t threaten their jobs, as long as the matter was kept within the company. Only when these accounts went public, and endangered the solvency of the entire company, did the toxic mistreatment of women and other categories of people within the company become a matter that Uber’s leadership treated with urgency — not merely because the problem wasn’t prioritized before, but because the “bro” culture had been a selling point for Uber. The sexism was a feature, not a bug.
The lectures of Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel, collected in the book Zero to One, are refreshingly candid about the usefulness of excluding competent people for narrow reasons. Thiel tells of a PayPal interviewee who was impressive, but who made a fatal mistake — they mentioned casually that they liked to “play hoops”.
That’s it. They were done.
Thiel justifies this by arguing that it’s practically helpful to have a culturally homogenous team. My point is not to denounce Peter Thiel: he’s just saying out loud what thousands of leaders and managers know and act on daily. That’s how racism works, a lot of the time: it is conducted by people who don’t set out with the goal of being racist. It’s just that perpetuating racism is convenient to their power.
That is, the color of money may be green, but it is no guarantee against racism. In fact, it is often earned with a little help from racism.
There is a misconception about racism that someone needs to be motivated by racist animosity for their actions to qualify as racist. And there is a misconception that racism is something people are, rather than something that people do, or that institutions build into their structure.
This sort of racism happens constantly. Often it’s hidden behind euphemisms and personal judgments that align behind the status quo: a racism of quiet convenience.
But other times, it’s blatant. And if you think no one would be foolish enough to be baldly racist anymore, you would be very wrong.
A few years ago, one Asian-American woman I know was part of a university hiring process that came down to a choice between two candidates: one a White man, the other an Asian-American woman. The gap in qualifications — in the woman’s favor — was unmistakable; it was a research position, and the woman had more than three times the number of papers published. (My friend counted. And she also felt that the published work was incomparably more significant and cited.)
Most of the hiring committee was White and male. And what these White men kept coming back to was not the credentials, and not the quality of the candidates’ interview responses, but their own intuition.
They said, “I can really imagine working with him.”
They said, “I’m just not sure if she would fit in.”
Again, these White people and men were not aiming to be racist or sexist in and of itself. They were just using racism and sexism as practical tools — to feel less threatened, to feel in control, to have less impressive competition, to protect their own chances for internal promotion. Racism and sexism in this process were not absolutely necessary, they were already at work, by default. It would have taken deliberate effort to counteract and neutralize them, and the committee members had no interest in making that effort.
The White man being chosen for the position.
In any organization, there are strong reasons to prize competence, no matter what. But there are also strong reasons to discourage competence, and to condition belonging and power first and foremost on other existing dynamics. Racism, sexism, and transphobia offer not only destructive motivations in and of themselves. They also offer useful, plausibly deniable, surprisingly palatable tools to ignore or even oppose competence.
So what, then, really is the color of money?
