It’s been a pretty grim week for anyone who believes in the civic irrelevance of skin colour, especially for those whose own is dark. In the UK, many people of Caribbean ancestry who have lived here for as long as they remember have found themselves needing to prove their right to remain, only to have the insult doubled by the Home Office destroying the very evidence they need. In America, Starbucks closed all its stores for staff training after one of their managers called the police to remove two men whose only crime seemed to be possession of too much melanin in a white area.
Both incidents testify to the stubborn persistence of institutional racism, a subtle form of bias that leads to discrimination by an organisation without any overt or even conscious racists. 50 years after Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood speech” and 25 years after the murder of Stephen Lawrence, this is especially depressing, since it is hardly as though most organisations haven’t long adopted policies to try to counter discrimination.
There are many reasons for this lack of progress, but I wonder if there is one that is not sufficiently understood or appreciated. To see what it is, we need to look a little more carefully at the particular circumstances of each incident.
The British case is clearest of all. The Home Office made two major mistakes. The first was administrative: a decision was taken to destroy old records of entry into the UK which now turn out to be of vital importance, mainly, it seems, because of data protection concerns.
In retrospect it seems obvious that this was a misguided priority. But that is just the kind of mistake people make when they work in a compliance culture. In a compliance culture, you don’t think about what the morally or even practically right thing to do is, you simply do what you believe maximises your chances of satisfying the regulations, following your orders, meeting your targets.
The second mistake was that a “hostile environment” towards immigrants was actively encouraged by the Home Office’s political overlords. Even if we accept that this was only ever intended to be directed against illegal immigrants, such cultures have a habit of refusing to stay constrained within neatly defined boundaries. Home Office officials have for too long been suspicious of all immigrants, assuming asylum seekers to be bogus until proven otherwise and demanding unrealistic evidence for their case.
The Starbucks case is harder to unpick because it was one manager, one stupid decision. However, a detail stands out: the immediate cause of the incident was the manager insisting that toilets were for customer use only. So when one of the men asked to use it, the manager immediately got drawn into antagonistic mode.
I may have misunderstood exactly what went on in either or both case, but on my reading they seem to exemplify all too well something vitally important about why organisations so often fail to act ethically. In a nutshell it is that they overstate rules, policies, procedures and grossly underestimate the importance of culture, of virtue.
It’s clearest in the Home Office case. Not only has the ministry been too fixated on narrow targets over higher goals, data protection over protection of citizens, it has actively promoted precisely the wrong kind of culture, one that makes discrimination almost inevitable. I can be less sure in the Starbucks case, but at the very least the manager was too keen to uphold company policy on restroom use to the neglect of its avowed values.
To fix this organisations of all kinds need to put values and character first, rules and policies second. A Starbucks manager or franchisee needs to be told to always strive to act according to the virtues of hospitality and equality. If that sometimes means allowing non-customers to use the restroom, so be it. It certainly means not treating someone who asks to use it as some kind of trespasser. Home Office civil servants need to be told that the clue is in their job title. Their first duty is to serve the people and if a directive or target seems to go against that, they should at least pause to question.
Readers familiar with the canon of Western or Chinese philosophy will already have recognised the theoretical template for all this. It’s there in the virtue of ethics of both Aristotle and Confucius. They recognised that since most of what we do is a matter of habit, getting these right is more important than having a list of rules or principles.
Traditionally, virtue ethics concerns the actions of individuals. But organisations have characters too, values and habits that infuse them and lead their members to act well. When the culture is wrong, it ends up nurturing bad virtues when anything is permissible. When an organisation doesn’t nurture any character at all, its members simply slavishly fulfil their duties, not even noticing when the consequences are bad. If the Home Office and Starbucks yield to the temptation to address their failings only by introducing yet more policies or protocols, they will have failed to learn a more than two-millennia old lesson that remains just as important today.
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