Companies Firing Innocent Employees Over Alleged Racial Offenses To Save Face, Report Finds

What the #MeToo movement and modern feminism did to those wrongly accused of sexism and sexual assault, the current anti-racism movement is doing to those wrongly accused of racism.

Companies across the country, desperate to show that they are not racist, have been firing employees after they have been publicly accused of racism – whether the evidence supports the accusation or not. Yascha Mounk has taken a look at the recent string of firings and has published his findings in The Atlantic. Mounk found that many of the fired employees did nothing wrong yet were fired anyway to appease the mob.

Mounk detailed the case of Emmanuel Cafferty, a man whose mother is Latina and whose father has Mexican and Irish ancestry, who was accused of being a white supremacist. Cafferty was driving home from his then-job at San Diego Gas & Electric company in a white company truck. He had his arm hanging out the window as he drove and was flipped off by another driver when he stopped at a red light. That driver then started making the “okay” hand gesture at Cafferty and cussing at him. At the next light, the man held up his phone toward Cafferty and shouted at him to “Do it! Do it!” Cafferty told Mounk he didn’t know what the man meant so he held up the “okay” sign like the other driver was doing.

Two hours later, Cafferty was informed by his supervisor that he had been seen flashing a white-supremacist hand gesture and was suspended. Within a week, he was fired. As Mounk explained, most people don’t know that the “okay” hand gesture has been ceded to white supremacists.

Cafferty said he certainly didn’t know that, yet his pleas to his employer were ignored. At one point, Cafferty told Mounk, “I got so desperate, I was showing them the color of my skin. I was saying, ‘Look at me. Look at the color of my skin.’”

Cafferty told Mounk that SDG&E didn’t present any evidence he was a racist or that he even knew that the “okay” hand gesture was a symbol of white supremacy, yet he was fired. An SDG&E spokesperson wouldn’t answer Mounk’s specific questions and instead provided a vague statement:

SDG&E employees are held to a high standard and are expected to live up to our values every day, whether in interactions with fellow employees or the public. The company did more than simply react to the photo. Multiple factors led to the decision to terminate. We conducted a good faith and thorough investigation that included gathering relevant information and multiple interviews, and took action in line with those values. While we are not able to reveal the full circumstances surrounding our investigation, we stand by our decision and will not be commenting any further.

Even the other driver belatedly admitted that he “may have gotten ‘spun up’ about the interaction and misinterpreted it.” Yet Cafferty is still out of a job.

Another casualty of this rush-to-judgment era was David Shor, who was fired after sharing the findings of a study (conducted by someone else – who is black – and published in a prestigious political-science journal) that showed violent riots decrease Democrat turnout. Shor was soon fired. His employer denied that the tweets led to the firing even though a Twitter mob demanded it.

“When I pressed Civis for evidence that Shor had been, despite appearances, fired for wrongdoing unrelated to his tweet, the company asked me to publish a new statement. It was almost identical to the original, but it omitted the first sentence asserting that Civis would never terminate employees for tweeting academic papers,” Mounk wrote.

Yet another man, Madji Wadi, lost his business after it became public that his daughter published racist tweets. Wadi fired her quickly, but it wasn’t enough.

“Cafferty was punished for an offense he insists he did not commit. Shor was punished for doing something that most wouldn’t even consider objectionable. Wadi was punished for the sins of his daughter. What all of these rather different cases have in common is that none of the people who were deprived of a livelihood in the name of fighting racism appear to have been guilty of actually perpetuating racism,” Mounk wrote.

Mounk further stated:

First, these incidents damage the lives of innocent people without achieving any noble purpose.

Second, such injustices are liable to provoke a political backlash. If a lot of Americans come to feel that those who supposedly oppose racism are willing to punish the innocent to look good in the public’s eyes, they could well grow cynical about the enterprise as a whole.

Third, those of us who want to build a better society should defend the innocent because movements willing to sacrifice justice in the pursuit of noble goals have, again and again, built societies characterized by pervasive injustice.