Two Affirmative Action Harassment Stories You Won’t Hear about from the SPLC

By Nicholas Stix
01/01/2009
VDARE

Robert Habern, 55, is the Ohio State Department of Transportation “equal employment opportunity contracts coordinator,” whose job “is to ensure that vendors with agency contracts comply with federal and state anti-discrimination laws.” That means he gets to bully companies into hiring and retaining workers, based on the color of their skin, sex, etc. His job doesn’t require much work, so he spent his time on the job sending out “racist and sexist e-mails,” which got him suspended for two weeks without pay in October, but he’ll get to keep his job.

The story just made it to print, over two months later.

Then there was Habern’s e-mail a year ago, “joking about giving jobs to women with large breasts.” That got him a verbal reprimand, whatever that is.

And then there was his 2004 laugh riot, “for viewing inappropriate material online [on the job], including sexually explicit Web sites,” which got him a 20-day suspension without pay.

Not to worry about Habern’s latest adventure. He told an AP reporter,

Everything’s all taken care of and squared away. It’s over with. I don’t even want to bring it back up. It’s done and over with.

[Ohio Anti-Bias Worker Sent Racist, Sexist E-mails, Probe Finds, Associated Press, December 30, 2008.]

The problem starts with all affirmative action jobs, in that they are expressly political jobs that exist to give their holders, who are members of “protected classes,” license to make mischief and harass members of targeted classes (everyone who isn’t “protected”), and typically entail near political invulnerability. And an employer isn’t permitted to keep such job holders productively busy, so as to keep them out of mischief: That would constitute “workplace harassment.” The productive work is thus done by the very targeted classes whose work life is made miserable by the protected classes.

But Habern wasn’t merely an affirmative action hire, he was an AA officer. He must have figured that he was entitled to shoot people, if he felt like it, so why was anyone complaining?

Racist license was behind the harassment during the year just ended of Purdue University (which is part of the public, University of Indiana system) janitor-student Keith John Sampson, about whom James Fulford wrote, by a “functionally illiterate,” racist, black female colleague, who took offense to an anti-KKK book Sampson was reading during his work breaks, and which colleague was then aided and abetted by the director of the school’s office of affirmative action (since renamed the “office of equal opportunity,” in order to confuse people), Lillian Charleston, and her deputy, Marguerite Watkins.

As Fulford wrote, Charleston was guilty of “incredible stupidity,” but having license to be guilty of “incredible stupidity,” and impose that stupidity on the non-stupid is pretty much Charleston’s job description. As one of the speakers in the video on Sampson’s case says, Sampson’s tormentors figured that they could pretty much define anything they wanted to as “racial harassment” on his part.

With the help of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, Sampson survived, but for every Keith John Sampson who is vindicated, there are countless others who have to look for work elsewhere, just as for every Robert Habern, who got a slap on the wrist, there are countless others who are not disciplined at all, or who are even promoted. That is the character of the over 40-year-old regime of affirmative action, which the usurper-elect [“Obama”] considers “absolutely necessary” (at least, the race-based kind), and whose protected class he plans to greatly expand.

[Postscript, November 1, 2021: Somehow, it slipped my mind to post this here at the time. I only learned of my oversight when I looked for it for a comp book on race I’m working on. Note, too, that according to Steven Farron, in his classic work, The Affirmative Action Hoax: Diversity, the Importance of Character and Other Lies, at the time I wrote this article, the regime of racist discrimination known as “affirmative action,” “equal opportunity,” and “diversity,” was already at least 50 years old.]