Boeing communications boss resigns over sexist article he wrote in 1987
nypost.com
nypost.com
I sure as heck wouldn't want anyone judged for views they held 30 years ago. I don't want to be judged for the views I hold today in 30 years either.
That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal life now.
I'm a different person now than I was in college, and I'll be a different person in another 30 years. I may be a better person or a worse person -- I don't know yet -- but I definitely will not the same person I am today. I can think of few things a person might have done in 1987 which ought to affect their lives now.
This does not reflect well upon Boeing at all.
There is also an element of ageism here. Virtually anyone beyond some age will have held currently-unacceptable views at some point in their lives.
> That goes for most actions too: Even if you murdered someone 30 years ago, if you served your time and reformed, you ought to be able to have a normal life now.
If a person molested one child 30 years, should a label of "sex offender" follow them as they attempt to regain their life as a youth educator? Should they never ever be allowed near children again?
If someone wrote in their youth on the violent nature of the negro and their intellectual inferiority, should they be entrusted with a leadership position over black Americans?
There were plenty of, for example, KKK members who then became anti-KKK activists. If you were born in 1915, and your parents were a member of the KKK, odds are pretty good you might have written something like that in the 1930's. It's how you were brought up. We don't have permanent digital records of everything that happened, but I'd say it's almost guaranteed you would have expressed such views.
If by the 1950s and 1960's, you had renounced those views, and wanted to be a civil rights activist, it's important you can do that. If anything, familiarity with the opposition would make you more effective.
Without the ability to do that, the civil rights movement would have needed to wait for a lot of people to die (or at least retire). It happened when it did in part because people could and did change their minds.
So to answer your question: In all of the cases you listed, it's possible for people to grow and reform. It's a question of what evidence is available that they have, in fact, reformed. To go with the KKK example, sharing KKK secrets with the FBI, taking the large personal risk of publicly denouncing the organization, and joining the civil rights movement would be pretty darned good evidence.
Is there good reason to expect that they reformed?
Is it as or more reasonable to expect they've simply learnt to hold their more objectionable views close to the vest?
If the answer to the former is "no," and to the latter is "yes," then I don't really know how you'd expect anyone to work with a leadership that openly views them as a hindrance to the workplace.
If he'd made a public anti-semitic article 20 years ago, and didn't undertake very significant acts of reformation, certainly I would take for granted that he's still an anti-semite. There's no reason to imagine otherwise. And I'd feel very uncomfortable working for a company where the leadership includes and accepts a publicly professed anti-semite.
(1) He said so. (2) There weren't any allegations of improprieties in the past decade or two in the articles I've read. (3) 30 years ago, likely a majority (and certainly a near-majority) of people had at least some level of discomfort with women serving equally in the military. Today, it's an extremist view held by a tiny minority. Most people who held those views 30 years ago did, in fact, change views, not closet them up.
What you're describing is a symptom of exactly this cancel culture. People DO learn to hold their more objectionable views close to the vest, and that's a problem. People can't actually change views without open and critical conversations.
I live in an extremely progressive city with a lot of racism and bigotry simmering just below the surface. It's bad -- many people in positions of power hold extremely bigoted views. That never plays out in the open, but those people act on those views, either without articulating them, or articulating them as abstractions.
I see no way to address any of that without honest and open conversations, which we can't have. Saying the wrong thing leads to career death, so everyone says the PC thing.
And when racism happens, in most cases, people depart quietly, and move into a similar position at another company / school / police department / etc. It's pretty rare that anything goes public. But if it did -- someone was closed out of the economy because of a perception that they were racist -- what do you think the result of that on racial tensions would be?
It's important to have systems to address and resolve problems. If you have a racist, the desired outcome should be that in a few years, they're not racist anymore. Start there, and work backwards to how to build out systems to do that.
There's also a longer post about the value of due process, and of innocent-until-proven-guilty (which is not the same as NO process, which is what we often have right now).
As a footnote, your discomfort is not the paramount issue here. We have laws to protect former felons, people with bad credit records, etc. from employment discrimination. Even if I might rather not hire a former felon, or someone who can't manage their finances well, I'm not allowed to ask those questions in a job interview. That allows people who've made mistakes -- often much bigger than this one -- to return as contributing members of society. That's a good thing. Otherwise, we end up with revolving doors to jails. Indeed, I'd argue those are the laws which ought to be expanded -- they're not nearly strong enough, and that disproportionately impacts vulnerable populations. We want paths to remediation for everyone, rather than for no one.
> If someone wrote in their youth on the violent nature of the negro and their intellectual...
They should be judged based on their current opinions and actions.
I agree there needs to be a path forward for people to move beyond their mistakes, but it's not clear to me that time since last known offense is the only qualifier.
> They may become inhibited and stilted, self-consciously muting the more overt expressions of their comraderie because they feel that frank vulgarity is inappropriate in the presence of females, even if that vulgarity is a male social lubricant and if women profess not to object.
They may openly rebuff her presence because they are unable to relate to her on masculine emotional terms.
They may treat her with patronizing tolerance, as the unit's mascot.
They may being to compete with each other for her attention, breaking up group loyalties and shared destiny for individual sexual or romantic gratification.
Although his conclusion may have been wrong, it sounds like he was ahead of his time in predicting some consequences of sexisim that many feminists point out exist today.
To balance out your opinion of how right he was, he also said this:
>In contrast, women do not naturally band together ritual comradeship.
Clearly, he didn't provide any sources or reason to believe that. His article was armchair speculation. Repeating cultural beliefs without support, as if they were scientific facts, served as the mainstay of "polite" racism and sexism for decades, and although polite society has moved on from those cultural beliefs, it's a lesson to all of us that the practice of writing these unscientific articles never went out of fashion.
ISTM that he's predicting some very real social frictions, but that calling them "consequences of sexism" may be a bit silly-- unless you posit that literally any institutional dynamic that might disadvantage women in some way is per se structural/institutional sexism, which is really just a matter of semantics. They're consequences of forcing people presenting with very different gender roles (male vs. female) to interact in a newly diverse environment. This will always involve some compromising of values.
That it’s not clearly biological for a man to place a high priority on seeking a woman for “individual sexual or romantic gratification” in a way that can cause him to view other men as competitors at the expense of “group loyalties and shared destiny”?
If scientists of yore had "remain silent until you find a reason for your opinion" we'd probably still think the sun revolves around the earth.
Strictly speaking, as you suggest, it wouldn't be wrong to write, "I thought about it, and although I don't have any reason to believe it, the notion that women don't form groups for the sake of comradeship settled in to my mind, and with a gust of wind, floated from there to this paper." However nobody would ever write that! Passing off guesses as knowledge only works as a career if you try to dress up your guesses as knowledge, for example by phrasing them in a way that makes it sound like they're already commonly known.
What he wrote was essentially common knowledge at the time, not a novel theory that needed defending. That’s why elsewhere in this thread it is pointed out that you can’t judge it by today’s standards. We have different common knowledge today that people use as justifications for their opinions without feeling any need to cite a paper. Some of that knowledge is right and some wrong.
For a modern example, you could take a look at a comment that says his conclusions were wrong without citing any evidence.
First you cannot judge how people would talk or act in the past based in present values.
Why are people able to consider cultural subjectivity when talking about other cultures, but not our own? We are not the same society that we where 40 years ago. Things changed, opnions to
And event if the guy was sexist, this attitute dosent consider if his opnion changed over the years. People learn new things, get new experiences that change theirs perspectives.
Letting go a worker because of a opnion he held 35 years ago should be met with a lawsuit.
If you're saying that Boeing is out of control, I agree, although firing some exec for being passionately sexist at one time in his life doesn't rank on the list of their sins imo.
Would it? Or would anyone who tried to defend him also have their own 30+ years ago opinions dredged up? It's not safe for anyone until there is "herd immunity" against being cancelled and we're a long way from there yet.
“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
This wasn’t some tweet. And context matters in retrospect given what happened in the Tailhook era.
"Golightly stepped down Thursday as Boeing’s senior vice president of communications following an employee complaint about the 1987 article, which he called “embarrassingly wrong and offensive.”"
He’s not some kid on the internet.
The people on this thread calling this "cancel culture" could learn something from the frankness of the statement.
Keep in mind his company has military contracts. If the PR guy is on record opposing women in the military, even a long time ago... Not good.
But I think you miss the point. This guy's entire job was promote the public image when, among other things, selling to the military. And he wasn't rank and file. He was near the top.
He won't have trouble finding a job that doesn't involve giving a bad image to a military contractor.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...
Are folks here anticipating that they themselves will get canceled for their old sexist writings, or is there something else here?
"An army officer in the Qin dynasty was supposed to lead his troops somewhere but got delayed.
He asked a friend of his "What is the penalty for being late?"
"Death." Says his friend.
He then asks "What is the penalty for rebellion?"
"Death." Says his friend.
He replies "Well then..." And thus began the Dazexiang Uprising."
There are plenty of loud politicians that, since the 1970s, have supported gay rights; Bernie comes to mind [0]. (He also opposed DOMA [1].) Indeed, a majority of Americans, some 70%, have had to change their minds about this, but that does not mean that there were not folks back then who had reasonable moral stances about ensuring that all of us have the right to volunteer to go die for this country.
I'm not seeing what's actually bad here. Indeed I'm not even seeing what's vindictive. The wages of free speech is people reading and thinking about what you say.
[0] https://www.vox.com/2015/7/7/8905905/sanders-drugs-gay-right...
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/9/9/9295867/bernie-sanders-gay-sold...
In this context, "voluntarily resignation" usually means "resign now, or you're fired":
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/business/23family.html
"He could have just as easily issued a statement condemning his younger self for their sexist and puerile remarks, disavowing his older views and committing himself to doing better."
He did do all of these things. It didn't matter, he was still fired. No forgiveness allowed.
"Plenty of folks have done just that, and found themselves growing and improving as people."
In my experience, making someone apologize and then firing them anyway rarely leads them to personal growth.
"There are plenty of loud politicians that, since the 1970s, have supported gay rights; Bernie comes to mind [0]."
I don't think even Sanders supported gay marriage in the 80s. The linked clip just says that being gay shouldn't be illegal.
"Indeed I'm not even seeing what's vindictive. The wages of free speech is people reading and thinking about what you say."
Reading, thinking, and responding to speech is good and healthy. "You are never allowed to earn a living, participate in commerce, or support your family for the rest of your life, regardless of what you do or how many times you apologize" is vindictiveness.
1. I write an article or a comment that's acceptable, or even encouraged by the powerful people running the show today.
2. The powerful people get changed out for other powerful people, and they start encouraging different articles, articles very different from the ones I've been writing.
3. The new powerful people attack me for following the old powerful people, even though I'm willing to follow the new powerful people now that they're in charge.
4. I serve my time, and now that I'm out of the doghouse, the new powerful people want me to write things that agree with them. How can I feel safe doing that, when I will probably get thrown in the doghouse again once the next revolution happens?